Very large projects (or “major programmes”, in the terminology of Morris and Hough [1987], or “megaprojects”, in the terminology of Flyvbjerg [2014]) are defined as complex undertakings involving thousands of people, with budgets of several hundred million dollars over multiple years. In our study we focus on very large government projects, which is the category of projects that promise to significantly improve Nigeria’s economy but which have hurt the country because so many of them have wasted money and opportunities.

The starting point for the need to build specific professional knowledge on very large government projects is that the classic project management approaches represented in the Project Management Body of Knowledge by the Project Management Institute (PMI, 2017) are insufficient. The “stage gate process” approach of setting goals, identifying activities through a work breakdown structure, planning the activities (in ways that are mutually compatible), adding risk management and buffers, and monitoring budget compliance and milestones (intermediate deliverables) simply does not address the key difficulties inherent in very large projects: not only are the activities interdependent and therefore pose complex interactions, most critically, goals do not “fall from the sky” but are carefully negotiated constructs that demand both general buy-in and tangibility and feasibility in order to provide a solid basis for a project. This nature of project goals being “socially constructed” is particularly critical for large government projects, which touch upon multiple sub-groups of the population of a country.

This book is the first on large government project management in Nigeria, but it is by no means the first book on the subject globally. Famous examples abound across the globe of large (public) projects that ran into trouble, for instance, the Eurotunnel in France/the UK, the Hinkley Point nuclear power plant and the Crossrail project in the UK, the Berlin Airport in Germany and the collapsed terminal of Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, or the Denver Airport baggage transport system in the USA. Therefore, the management challenge of very large projects has been the focus of attention for practising managers and scholars, with textbooks and articles being produced on the subject over the last 60 years. The purpose of this book is not to reinvent the knowledge that has been accumulated but to examine its adaptation (if any) to the Nigerian context. This chapter summarizes some important elements of professional knowledge about very large project management; building on this knowledge, it then constructs a framework of variables that provides the basis for our study.

2.1 Project Success Factors as Lists

Very large projects are characterized by two challenges that make them hard to manage:

  1. 1.

    Complexity . There are thousands of people working on hundreds of different activities, and these activities are not isolated in silos but affect one another, for example, through physical interactions (such as competition for scarce space or material or energy flows), through resource interactions (competing for funds or personnel), through trade-offs among multiple competing desired outcomes, as expressed by owners and stakeholders, and through information flows (“Is the right hand aware of what the left hand is doing?”). Moreover, there are interactions over time—disillusioning a stakeholder group early on may make them ready to protest or resist against even minor glitches later or getting the governance decision structure wrong at the outset may lead to bad decision-making during the execution phase.

  2. 2.

    Uncertainty . Very large projects can take up to a decade to complete. This means that even if “proven technologies” are used (and thus the bare technology uncertainty is kept to a minimum), the world around the project inevitably changes during its execution: demographics and stakeholder needs change; the “benchmarks” change in the form of role model examples happening elsewhere; available technologies (and thus performance expectations) change; and so on. Therefore, very large projects often end up with (at least slightly) different outcomes than were foreseen at the outset. Change flexibility must be built in and thus requires collaboration between owners and stakeholders in renegotiating these outcomes.

Therefore, projects have been characterized as “evolving complex systems”—very large projects are complex beasts, and it is possible to get them wrong in a hundred different ways. Multiple studies have explored which characteristics of the environment, the task, and its complexity and uncertainty, the team, the surrounding organization and the management processes are important. As academic studies tend to focus on a narrow set of phenomena in order to be able to accomplish a “clean” investigation with reliable results, each study has tended to focus on a few variables at a time.

Table 2.1 provides a summary of 14 studies that produced “lists” of success drivers, with overlaps but also differences. As each study looks at its own set of circumstances, each observes a different set of success drivers as particularly relevant. To use an old Indian metaphor, seven blind men touching an elephant will each report different experiences because they each touch different parts of the animal.

Table 2.1 Lists of project success factors
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The success factors that have been emphasized shifted over time as knowledge progressed. Early studies such as Sayles and Chandler (1971) and Martin (1976) emphasized planning and resource management, team management, and supervision and control. In the early 1980s Baker , Murphy and Fisher (1988) turned their attention to factors related to the surrounding organizations and environments. The next decade of work added attitude and intent, project goals and social orientation (Baker et al., 1988).

However, a “super list” of success drivers that is simply the combination of the partial lists is of limited use because it does not enable an understanding of causality and therefore does not support a problem diagnosis of a specific project at hand. Therefore, “frameworks”, or groupings/classifications, of success drivers have been proposed. In this way, Belassi and Tukel (1996) proposed a framework in which the characteristics of the project manager and the team (such as ability, coordination and communication), of the project itself (such as size or uniqueness), of the organization (such as support and structure) and of the environment (such as politics and social) influence intermediate outcomes (such as client acceptance, the project manager’s performance and resource availability), which in turn influence project success. Misic and Radujkovic (2015) conducted a meta-analysis of previous studies and proposed a framework with success drivers falling into the groups of legal, risk, political and project manager and failure factors falling into the groups of strategy, ineffectiveness of risk analysis and closed communication.

Fortune and White (2006) developed, based on cases of IT projects, an explicit “system model” that features interdependent factors. Within the project, there is a decision-making system that allocates attention and resources, monitors performance and guides decisions. The wider system (corresponding to the organization) decides on the project design, provides resources and defines the performance expectations, as well as monitoring performance. This system as a whole is, in turn, affected by its external environment (such as stakeholders or political influence).

We want to focus attention on two frameworks that have been very influential and which are still, despite being 30 years old, insightful for a study such as ours. These two frameworks are proposed in the seminal studies of Morris and Hough (1987) and Miller and Lessard (2000).

2.2 The Project Success Frameworks of Miller and Lessard and Morris and Hough

2.2.1 Miller and Lessard (2000)

Miller and Lessard (2000) analysed large engineering projects (not necessarily government-run) and developed an understanding of the critical phase of “project shaping”. Projects are not “planned” but “shaped”. They do not “fall from the sky” as clearly articulated visions of great outcomes, but they slowly arise as rough ideas that need to be wrestled over and developed. This process is fundamentally messy, chaotic and untidy, and the outcomes are not pre-ordained but the results of decisions and moves (explicit and conscious or unconscious) made by managers—managers of the project owner, of various stakeholders and of customers and contractors.

The final “ design” of a project is not visible until much later, when several decisions have already been taken. A useful metaphor is imagining that one is flying into thick clouds (there is something attractive in the clouds, one needs to be convinced), which prevent managers from choosing take-off or landing approaches beforehand. If prepared with flexibility and resilience, managers can achieve success against all the odds. No one has time to wait for a perfect quantification of the probability of success or failure before approaching large projects. Managers engage in various strategies to confront complex adaptive risk, including shaping and mitigating, shifting and allocating, influencing and transforming institutions, and diversifying through portfolios. Risks are not externally given odds but shaped outcomes of decisions taken. Miller and Lessard’s navigating strategy for crossing hurdles over many shaping episodes (before implementation begins) is summarized in Fig. 2.1.

Fig. 2.1
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Miller and Lessard’s shaping episodes and commitment achieved. (Adapted from Miller & Lessard, 2000: 106)

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The framework proposes that there are five stages before the performance: concept (initiation and exploration of a hypothesis of a project that might be possible), script (holistic proposal that allows commencement of tangible negotiations), agreement (with a coalition of stakeholders after extended negotiation), moves and commitments (confronting emerging fears and offering solutions and assurances until parties are willing to make irreversible commitments), and, finally, the committable package (the project design and outcome distribution on which parties can achieve closure and final agreement—this is when contracts can be signed).

These phases must be traversed and their issues addressed as preconditions for the success of a very large project. If the shaping phases are glossed over, or trust and commitment are not achieved, the unaddressed issues will return later to haunt the project when it runs into inevitable problems over the course of execution. The shaping process ensures two key preconditions for success: (a) shaping (modification) of the original idea to offer value to all parties that contribute to, and can influence, the project (the original idea is never sufficiently balanced!); and (b) the building of a committed coalition that has at least a chance of withstanding the problems and changes that a very large project will have to go through.

2.2.2 Morris and Hough (1987)

Miller and Lessard’s framework directs our attention to the critical early phase of a project, long before any procurement has commenced—this turns out to be very relevant for the abandoned large government projects that we encounter in this study. The strength of Morris and Hough’s framework, by contrast, lies in providing an overarching view of the issues that a very large project must address. This framework was articulated based on eight detailed case studies of very large projects. It is summarized in Fig. 2.2.

Fig. 2.2
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Morris and Hough’s framework. (Adapted from Morris & Hough, 1987, Figure 12.1)

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The shaping process explained by Miller and Lessard is represented within the box “project definition”, including the relatedness of the goals to the participants and an absence of forcing decisions on them—the shaping process is not included in-depth (for this reason, the Miller and Lessard framework is worth taking into account in parallel), but the strength of Morris and Hough is the overarching view.

The framework includes the conceptual areas of client and owner attitudes (constructive or political?), the external environment (e.g. politics, communities and stakeholders), a sound financial plan and realistic and trackable schedule, and implementation driven by the organizational contract, resource availability and the quality, commitment and communication with the “team” (the people who work on the project).

The fact that arrows in the framework point in different directions (forwards and backwards) reminds us of the complexity of the project “beast”—there is no one-directional causal flow, but while project shaping influences later commitment, the scheduling and resource abilities from later also influence the shaping processes at the outset, and parallel activities influence one another.

We will now check whether previous studies from Nigeria are roughly consistent with the knowledge embodied in the success drive lists and the two frameworks (Table 2.1 and Figs. 2.1 and 2.2), or whether there is evidence that what is happening in Nigeria has fundamentally different characteristics. We will then build a combined framework that attempts to take into account all the aspects of previous knowledge that we have described, in a form that is suitable for measurement via a questionnaire .

2.3 The Nigerian Context

We pointed out in Chap. 1 that Nigeria suffers from poor performance (even widespread abandonment) of large government projects. The consequences are “a junk-yard of abandoned and failed projects worth billions” (Abimbola , 2012; Osemenan , 1987). Anigbogu and Shwarka (2011) observed that 50% of projects failed before they even commenced. Ayangade et al. (2009) also proposed that if a project is awarded in defiance of proper intent and contract definition, this will lead to flawed contract structures, poor job performance, job abandonment and improper contractor selection, thereby increasing the probability of project failure. All this is consistent with the hypothesis that Miller and Lessard’s shaping process is neglected or forgotten, resulting in poor set-up and intent.

Even among completed projects, Omoregie and Radford (2006) found average cost escalations of 114% and cost overrun and time delays of 188% across transport infrastructure projects. Ameh et al. (2010) found similar cost overruns in the telecommunications sector, driven by construction-related factors. These overruns among completed projects, for now disregarding the abandoned projects, are consistent with observations from other countries (see Flyvbjerg, 2007, 2014; Toor & Ogunlana, 2008; Roxas & Fillone, 2015). To give some examples, the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge project in Japan (1998) overran its budget by 263%, the Sydney Opera House by 1400%, the Denver International Airport by 200% and the Elbe Tunnel in Germany by 50%. The element of Nigerian large project performance that seems to be worse than in other countries is the extent of project abandonment.

Okereke (2 017) examined eight case studies of troubled large projects across Africa, including a renewal energy project in Nigeria. He found that the Nigerian project suffered from poor planning and a lack of both government support and management of maintenance once the facility had been completed. More generally across Africa, he concluded that the main reasons for failures lay in a lack of skills, resources and stakeholder considerations. This study thus sees key success drivers in the implementation and stakeholder phases of projects.

Olatunji (2018) examined in detail one especially large stalled project, the Ajaokuta steel plant project in Nigeria, which we will also revisit in detail in Chap. 11. Although the project had been discussed at length, when work began in earnest its gestation period was very short and decisions were made for political rather than performance reasons (such as being located in a politically desirable region but far from ore and coal), neglecting technological constraints (such as the low iron content of the local ore) and exacerbated by numerous changes in the political leadership of the country. The resulting cost increases made the available financing insufficient, and therefore, the plant is still not operational 30 years on. Olatunji calls it “neither a complete failure nor a considerable success. Rather, it is more of a story of philosophical symbolism” (p. 339), an assessment that we disagree with (see Chap. 11). However, the case study is again roughly consistent with the importance of Miller and Lessard’s shaping process, as well as with continuity of execution.

In sum, the available evidence from Nigeria presents nothing to suggest that the success drivers that are at play are fundamentally different from what the global professional literature has identified to date. This supports our expectation that the question is not “What unique reasons exist in Nigeria that have led to the abandonment of 63% of large public projects?” but “Which success drivers (of the many that have been identified) are particularly important in the Nigerian context, explaining the high rate of large project abandonment?” We therefore proceed with the construction of a combined framework that includes the work reviewed so far (Table 2.1 and Figs. 2.1 and 2.2). The combined framework will serve as the basis for the empirical study.

2.4 The Extended Theoretical Framework

We now combine the most important success factors from Table 2.1 and from Morris and Hough (1987) and Miller and Lessard (2000) into one combined framework, as shown in Fig. 2.3. The framework has a similar structure to, and the same presentation as, Hough and Morris, as this representation of grouped success factors is well suited for capture in a set of measures that can be tested in a questionnaire. It is a conceptual framework that explains the concepts (success factors) that we have identified from the accumulated knowledge (as opposed to a theoretical framework that explains causal relationships [see Grant & Osanloo, 2014]) and which we want to examine further.

Fig. 2.3
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An extended framework of success factors in mega projects

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The combined framework starts with attitude and intent (as in Fig. 2.2) but divides “project definition” into two parts: the definition itself (how clear, valuable, visionary and feasible/pragmatic—clear and accepted goals are valuable as maps during the complexities of execution; and the shaping process that we have incorporated in order to represent Miller and Lessard’s insights.

The shaping process produces a shared vision, combined with preparedness for the necessary problem-solving in the face of inevitable changes: (i) the need to test the vision with stakeholders and pre-work to prove the concept (e.g. technical tests and social impact tests), (ii) iteration of thought to reduce technical and stakeholder risks, (iii) the use of proven technologies (if novelty, then appropriate buffering and back-ups) and (iv) the assembly of a stable coalition of sponsors and supporters committed to the project. A successful project is not selected (i.e. chosen at the outset in all its features from a field of project candidates) but “shaped”, in the sense that an initial idea evolves and morphs to incorporate more and more essential elements and robustness. When plans are shaped and reshaped, it becomes possible to conclude that the project is not viable, and sponsors can cut their losses on time. The shaping process is essential to project success because of the robustness (in terms of technical and operational concepts and stakeholder support) that it creates.

We have added a box on risk management (which should proactively commence in parallel to the shaping process). There is a need to prepare the project for the landscape of risks; some risks can be anticipated, while others are unknown until they occur. Mapping project risk requires (i) accurate risk identification (external experts and scenario identification); (ii) risk prioritization (e.g. by impact or likelihood); (iii) risk management, for example, via a countermeasure portfolio (buffers, mitigation, elimination, contingencies and insurance); and (iv) the knowledge that mega projects always have some unknowns, so some “pre-warning” can be produced by identifying knowledge gaps (the areas of black swans or unknown unknowns).

We have divided Morris and Hough’s “environment” box into two parts: one for the external general environment and one for the stakeholders that are specific to the project. External factors are outside the influence of the project organization. An external factor might even be the government of another country. For instance, the Kariba Dam in Zambia owed some of its success to external influence. The sudden discovery of a design flaw required a foreign power’s support for the dam to be repaired (at a cost of $298M). The money needed for reconstruction was beyond the reach of the domestic government. External factors include prices, regulation, corporate changes, regional and political constellations, individual and government commitment, and community factors. The ability of a project to achieve its goals also depends on the attitude or communication quality with the exogenous environment. The term “stakeholder” refers to a person or an organization (interest group) with an interest in, or concern about, the project. Henisz (2016) identified various ways of mapping and involving stakeholders such as politicians, industries, pressure groups, communities or the public.

The planning and resource management box addresses the “homework” that each project team needs to do, putting well-considered plans and schedules in place, with contingencies and interdependencies well understood, and monitoring procedures well established and integrated with risk management (as in Morris and Hough). A key element of this is that the resources for the project must be planned and safeguarded (so they do not unexpectedly disappear or need to be “re-won”). This may sound evident, but it turns out that this very point is often not fulfilled in the Nigerian context.

Team management refers to leadership at the project level, skill availability, sponsorship in the wider organization (including the government agencies that supervise) and effective problem-solving, monitoring and communication procedures.

Supervision and control refer to the presence of a functioning “governance structure” (or steering committee) that has the competence and time to understand the project’s status and to make decisions when changes or conflicts occur (Loch et al., 2017). When this governance structure does not perform, projects succumb to the problems that inevitably arise but are mastered by well-governed projects. This governance must be led by the owning government agency, using resources and skills, but unfortunately, this is often not guaranteed.

As most large government projects are carried out by contracting firms, contractor management is central. This includes both legal provisions and maintaining trust and relationships that reduce a contractor’s temptation to behave opportunistically. The project manager must ensure that the contract and contractors are managed. Contract management in large government projects requires: (i) contractor selection by quality and track record, not just price; (ii) explicit bid specification (quality and realism); (iii) risk and uncertainty distribution, dispute resolution and incentives; (iv) collaboration and communication both with and among contractors (coordination); (v) continuity of contractor personnel (if a change cannot be avoided, there must be proper handover and training); and (vi) involvement of contractors in monitoring and preparing the necessary changes to encourage sharing in the spirit (not just the letter) of collaboration.

This framework summarizes the relevant professional knowledge on very large (government) projects in a form that can serve as the basis for our empirical investigation of why so many government projects are abandoned in Nigeria. As we said earlier, we do not expect phenomena to arise that have never been observed elsewhere (although if this were the case, our case studies would have a chance to detect these “new” success drivers). Our study will translate this framework into a questionnaire to collect analysable data and complement the data analysis with qualitative case studies that provide causal narratives on how events have unfolded.

2.5 What About Corruption?

Finally, a word on corruption. Corruption is pervasive, not only in developing countries but also to some degree in developed countries. It has not appeared in our overview of professional knowledge—this is not because it is not important but because it is uncomfortable to discuss. Corruption clearly does exist in Nigeria. Studies have examined the effects of corruption in other countries: a classic theoretical analysis (Shleifer & Vishny, 1993) analysed corruption in comparison to a “tax”. This study concluded that corruption, because it is illegal and secretive (as its proceeds benefit a special interest group rather than the public), is much more costly and damaging than taxes; moreover, weak governments that do not control their agencies tend to suffer more from corruption than strong governments with transparency and processes in place. In an empirical study Locatelli et al. (2017) examined corruption in large rail projects in Italy, and while they found it hard to quantify the effect of corruption, they found strong evidence that it causes additional budget and schedule overruns.

It is very difficult to get people to speak about corruption because of their concerns about the repercussions. We conducted one interview with a senior project manager of a major contractor (who spoke on the condition of guaranteed anonymity). This person estimated that corruption adds, on average, 30% to the budget of a large government project.

This would be bad enough, but if this were all it would perhaps be a small price to pay if one could prevent the abandonment of large government projects by paying some people off. However, corruption is even more corrosive because it also distorts decisions. For instance, some project goals are downplayed, which benefits the goals of the briber; some stakeholders may be frozen out because others have bribed; and the project design may favour some performance dimensions, which are in the interest of the bribers, over other dimensions. As a result, projects affected by corruption will drift away from the public benefit purposes that they are supposed to serve; as a result, their value will diminish, resistance from left-out stakeholders may increase, projects may become more likely to fail, and, if they do succeed, they will provide fundamentally diminished value to the public.

In order to test this corrosiveness of corruption, this success drive will be explicitly added to our questionnaire, as we describe in the next chapter. The effect of corruption on project decisions will be visible in the econometric analysis and be illustrated in detail in several of the case chapters (in particular Chap. 10) .