Project, programme and portfolio management solutions provider The Project Group (TPG) Africa has joined forces with TPG America to bring its integrated

project management control system (iPMCS) to Africa.

The iPMCS has successfully managed more than $50-billion in capital projects in the US and TPG Africa believes it can contribute significantly towards improving project management for large projects in Africa.

TPG Africa MD Dries van der Colff tells Mining Weekly that the system was designed to manage financials, schedules and project controls for medium to large capital programmes and projects.

He notes that there have recently been changes in the way in which mining and construction companies in South Africa handle the management of their capital projects.

“Previously, the dominant contracting model was that mining houses hired consultants to carry out feasibility studies for certain projects and then the work was contracted out in its entirety to an engineering, procurement and construction management (EPCM) company.

“This resulted in the mining house not only having limited control over the project and its progress but also relying on the EPCM company for project information and statistics.

At TPG Africa, we equated this to throwing a bag of money over a wall and hoping to get the desired outcome,” says Van der Colff.

He says that, in recent years, mining companies have wanted more control over their projects and have taken up the role of the EPCM company to carry out the contracting themselves.

“In doing this, a lot of our major mining clients have had to face the same two challenges. Firstly, they often lacked some of the in-house expertise that an EPCM company would have. We assisted them in finding these skills on the market by hiring, for example, risk specialists.

“Secondly, many of our clients did not have the necessary systems to manage the project process. For megaprojects you need more than a simple scheduling tool, you need cost control systems, risk management, time control and more. We assisted our clients in identifying the best systems that could help them improve in these knowledge areas,” says Van der Colff.

He notes that this brought about a separate challenge, as the clients now had multiple systems that needed to be integrated to work together.

“The IPMCS was a logical conclusion to this journey, as it integrates all the major knowledge areas for large construction and mining projects into one system. It has been successful in the US and we wanted to bring that success to South Africa and offer it to the major mining companies here,” he says.

Van der Colff notes that, in Africa, project management as a whole is immature, especially outside of South Africa.

“Coordination on large-scale projects is shocking, with companies so often at the mercy of their contractors. There is huge room for improvement in project management on the continent and we hope to be a part of this improvement,” he states.

As part of this initiative, TPG Africa will open a branch in Botswana in mid-February.

“Going forward, we are also hoping to provide more consulting and governance work, as we have been successfully focusing on project management systems for many years now,“ he says.