Ac­cord­ing to the Min­is­ter of Sport, Gary Hunt, the Bri­an Lara Sta­di­um, orig­i­nal­ly meant to be com­plet­ed in time to host match­es for the ICC 2007 Crick­et World Cup is now be­ing com­plet­ed as part of the Tarou­ba Sport­ing Com­plex, a large fa­cil­i­ty com­pris­ing sev­er­al ameni­ties in­clud­ing a cen­tre of ex­cel­lence for sports sci­ence and med­i­cine. De­signed by US ar­chi­tec­tur­al firm Hell­muth, Obal­at & Kass­abum, this fa­cil­i­ty will al­so con­sist of an aquat­ic cen­tre, in­door gym­na­si­um, cy­cling velo­drome, car park and ho­tel ac­com­mo­da­tion.

In Jan­u­ary of 2008, Min­is­ter of Sport Gary Hunt was quot­ed as say­ing "We are go­ing to look at a val­ue for mon­ey prin­ci­ple in all projects that we ex­e­cute and this project is no dif­fer­ent," re­fer­ring to the Tarou­ba Sport­ing Com­plex. How­ev­er, he was al­so quot­ed as say­ing "It is not fea­si­ble to give pro­ject­ed cost for the en­tire sport­ing com­plex and all the planned in­fra­struc­ture, as the un­der briefs for all sport­ing in­fra­struc­ture are not yet com­plete." Ex­am­i­na­tion of these state­ments leads one to won­der ex­act­ly what the Min­is­ter's idea of "val­ue for mon­ey" re­al­ly is?

Al­so, one has to ask the ques­tion, who hired a project man­age­ment team in­ca­pable of pro­vid­ing pro­ject­ed costs for a project for a giv­en pe­ri­od of time? Fun­da­men­tal project man­age­ment the­o­ry de­fines a project as a unique ven­ture with a be­gin­ning and an end con­duct­ed to meet es­tab­lished goals with­in the pa­ra­me­ters of cost, scope and time. Cost is usu­al­ly the most im­por­tant fac­tor in man­ag­ing any project and there­fore needs to be con­trolled.

The fact that pro­ject­ed costs can­not be es­ti­mat­ed for a project of that mag­ni­tude is a se­ri­ous in­di­ca­tion of poor man­age­ment prac­tice. Scope de­f­i­n­i­tion, scope man­age­ment, sched­ul­ing and bud­get­ing are all use­ful ways of ad­dress­ing these is­sues but per­haps no one man­ag­ing the project is ac­tu­al­ly aware of these things. All this and yet we have the Min­is­ter boast­ing of us­ing "val­ue for mon­ey prin­ci­ples" in the man­age­ment of state projects.

Dic Kha­rank

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