How Poor Project Governance Causes Delays

Anthony Morgan and Sena Gbedemah

October 2010

A paper presented to the Society of Construction Law at a meeting in London on 2nd February 2010

The paper examines the extent to which poor project governance affects the timeline for delivery of capital projects generally, leading to increased costs and ultimately project failure. It briefly considers the reasons projects fail, and then takes a step back to trace the development of both project management and corporate governance as they converge into project governance, before discussing what project governance entails. This is followed by two case studies which demonstrate how poor governance has caused project delay. For owners of capital projects, the last section considers what components are necessary to establish a capital project governance framework.

Introduction - Reasons for project failure - The development of project management and the need for project governance - Corporate governance and the development of project governance - Case study 1: Metronet - Case study 2 - Relevance of project governance in generating delayed completion.

The authors: Anthony Morgan is a partner and Sena Gbedemah a senior manager with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

Text and appendix 17 pages