Abstract:
National Water Supply and Drainage Board (NWSDB) is the principal authority providing safe drinking
water and facilitating the provision of sanitation to the nation. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the
NWSDB to ensure that the projects undertaken be completed within the prescribed period of time and
budget to the prescribe quality in order to assure quality water and an uninterrupted availability of
water supply.
Most water supply and sanitation contracts do not meet set cost or time targets as a result of improper
assessment of project management challenges. The majority of time and cost overruns are attributable
to either unforeseen or foreseen project management challenges for which uncertainties were not
properly accommodated. The normal practice is not to have proper review or retrospect at the end of
the projects. However, the project management challenges still prevail in the industry as lessons learned
but as tacit knowledge.
Identification of the project management challenges
review and a questionnaire was developed to assess the importance and the severity of the effect of each
challenge. Relative importance of the challenges were identified analysing the collected data.
The key project management challenges in implementing foreign funded water supply and sanitation
projects are related to human resources and should be addressed as a developing nation. National
policies shall be introduced, modified, altered and diversified towards building skilled human resources,
which is the demand of the future world.
Additionally, findings will provide an opportunity to both the NWSDB and the contractors to forecast
possible critical scenarios and identify common pitfalls so as to eliminate the avoidable and highlight
them to the management to avoid recurrences of such phenomena.
