The role of project management methodology in municipal service delivery, with a particular reference to Metropolitan Municipalities in South Africa.

Abstract

The aim of this research was to investigate the impact of project management methodology to service delivery at Metropolitan Municipalities in the Republic of South Africa. The study was conducted across all six metropolitan municipalities. These Municipalities are as follows: eThekwini Metropolitan municipality, City of Cape Town, City of Ekurhuleni, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan municipality, City of Johannesburg and City of Tshwane. Literature review reveals that project management incorporates all management principles. An interesting finding provided by literature review is that no known publication that presents how projects were managed in times of Great Wall of China, Egyptian Pyramids, and European Cathedrals. What is interesting is that these structures are in place but there are few records to inform how the projects were managed. Another important discovery through literature review is that the study of project management is new in the field of public administration, as it was inherited from military and engineering disciplines. Project management has been more effective and efficient for engineers in their massive construction and designing new machinery and military personnel in their missions of war, peace-making and other interventions. This research study has shown that project managers need intense capacity building on the project management discipline. Project managers are not as strong on project management theory, as expected. Some project managers do not have qualifications on project management, which makes execution of projects at Metropolitan Municipality levels difficult and challenging. These findings made a very interesting break-through in understanding of what makes municipalities fail to deliver services as expected. Project reports were collected from each metropolitan municipality. These reports are clearly indicating that some projects are experiencing challenges in areas of project planning, financing, procurements, quality and contracts. Some projects do not finish on time as a result of above identified challenges. Proper implementation and management of project will bring about drastically improvement in service provision by Metropolitan municipality.