By Charles Kumolu & Dickson Omobola

Henry Mbadiwe is the Registrar of the Chartered Institute of Project Management of Nigeria, CIPMN, a body supervised by the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment. In this interview, he explains how the institute regulates project management activities to ensure compliance and safety.  

How have things been since you emerged as President of CIPMN?

It has been a few months now. Everything has been okay. CIPMN is a new body and we have a big task. In Nigeria, projects spring up every time and everywhere. These projects need to be managed by professionals, who should be licensed and accredited by us. It hasn’t been done before, which means I am the pioneer registrar tasked with putting in place all the regulatory, certification and licensing activities as well as the required criteria. As the registrar, it is my job to ensure that these things are done. If such was in place before, it would have been easier to follow the process, but it hasn’t been done before. It means my job   is a project because I have to create everything from scratch. It is not easy, but I have a good team and a wonderful council that is supportive. So far, it has been good.

Would you say you are getting the desired support from the ministry under which CIPM operates?

The Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Doris Uzoka-Anite, is new. In the short time she has been a minister, she has taken time out to see us. Personally, I have had meetings with her and the institute has had meetings with her too. We have discussed CIPMN and what it can do for Nigeria. She has been giving her utmost support. The Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investments, Dr Evelyn Ngige, has also been giving her support. It is not an easy thing, particularly in a ministry where you have about 16 big parastatals and we are the smallest and youngest. However, she still makes time to see us. So, yes.

In terms of accrediting and regulating all project management activities in Nigeria, what has CIPMN been doing?

We have an event coming up on December 11 until 13. It is designed to bring in new members. Individuals who want to be project managers will come for training and we will give them a direct membership certificate and a license later. This induction is the last one for the year. Meaning it might not happen like this again because going into next year, there will be other requirements that would be added to become a member of the Institute. Also, we are working on a curriculum. We just designed a new curriculum for the National University Commission, NUC, for project management. It is the first to be done in Nigeria. We are also designing a curriculum for the licensing and certification of our members. Again, we are working on all of these things; we are not done, but we are on it.

What are the things to look out for from the induction?

It is a three-day event that will commence on Monday, December 11 to Wednesday, December 13. It will be an all-day event and we are going to have speakers. We have Harvard-trained professors who currently teach in Harvard coming to Nigeria to train project managers. We also have professors from esteemed Nigerian universities and individuals who have been in the industry as well. A lot of knowledge sharing, knowledge generation will go on within those three days. At the end of the day, everybody who gets inducted within those three days will be a member of CIPMN. It means they are the recognised project managers in Nigeria. The law says that for you to manage any project in this country, you need to be certified, licensed and be a member of the CIPMN. After the event, participants will get a membership certificate and be a step closer to the endgame. The event will be held in Chelsea Hotel in Central Area, Abuja.

Since the Institute is new, what is the attitude of Nigerians towards its activities?

Very optimistic. The chairman of our council is Chief Emmanuel Olabode-Afolayan and Our president is Prince Akinnola Babalola. Those two individuals have been so instrumental in ensuring that Nigerians view CIPMN in a positive light. People are coming, they want to get regulated, they want to get the licence and they want to give themselves an edge because, very soon, if you are not a licenced project manager from our Institute, we will stop you from delivering projects to either the public or private sector. The idea is not to make it difficult or create a burden, but to have a unified way of doing things in this country, so that we stop seeing problems here and there or things going bad. Nigerians have been optimistic.

The culture of abandoning projects is a major challenge in the country. How are you tackling it?

We are creating a product delivery methodology called DUCAP. It has something called plans for sustainability, which means before a project is started or approved, we will know how it will be delivered and sustained. We want to ensure that the idea about how it will be sustained, if credible, is as good as running the project in the first place. This methodology is a way of delivering projects that ensures that we train project managers on how to start a project, finish a project and hand over a project by which there is a known plan of how it will be sustained so that the project, even after delivery, doesn’t go unmanaged. It also ensures that even while we are delivering the project, this methodology is designed to help ensure that we don’t see a single abandoned project in Nigeria. Nobody would finish a project halfway. As a project manager you can stop a project, but you need to know why you are stopping it and it must not be because you run out of money. The way we are going to teach planning and management, everybody will be involved. From the senior stakeholders to the guy clearing the field, everybody has to be involved. We have set-up a new mindset, a new way of training individuals to ensure that things are done right.

Cases of building collapse are common in Nigeria. Is your organisation doing anything about it?

Humans cause some things themselves. If you know you are meant to build a foundation with a certain level of resistance and you cut costs, nobody can do anything about that as it is the individual being a thief. A project manager is meant to be responsible for every project. He is meant to make sure that every activity is properly captured. If the building collapses, the project manager is responsible. It is expected that when one sees a substandard project, he should capture the risk, flag it and do something to mitigate it. A project manager needs to be in charge. If the project manager doesn’t flag that risk, he is responsible for whatever happens. It might not be inexperience that makes buildings crash, it is just trying to save cost. Where there is inexperience, a project manager will track it. Right now, there are no project managers on projects. There is no one to look at risk, change or manage all of these things. That is why we are here, to prevent things like that from happening.

What has been your greatest challenge since you assumed office?

As a registrar, my job is to head the secretariat and manage the day-to-day affairs of the institute. It is not easy because I also have to manage the council members and other stakeholders. There is also the fact that a lot of people haven’t known me or the institute, so I have to make them understand. It has not been easy because these things are going on for the first time. It has been challenging, but interesting. 

The biggest challenge is that things are happening everywhere in Nigeria and we have to be involved. We don’t have the resources to be everywhere, yet we need to be everywhere. It has been very challenging, but I am trying my best to ensure that we cover as much ground as possible.

Can you tell us the composition of your members?

A project manager can be anybody. You don’t have to study project management in school. You can study art or accounting. Anybody can be a project manager as long as you have certain skills. Once you have the skillset, you can be a project manager. There is no restriction.

You practise project management in the United Kingdom. Can you make a comparison between the practice in the UK and Nigeria?

Experience and skills. Project managers in the UK, everybody, down to artisans, have skills. Many of them are properly trained, many of them have the skill, not just the book information. That is why our idea at CIPMN is to train people and give them skills to deliver projects, not just take a white board, show PowerPoint slides and give a certificate. We are developing a programme that has to do with knowledge and skill. What makes project managers, business analysts, product managers and all kinds of artisans is the skillset. They know how to do it and they have done it before. We need to teach people how to do it. Even if we are imparting the knowledge to you, we will still teach you how to do the physical stuff.

What do you think Nigeria should learn from project managers in the UK?

The standardised methodology, the way of doing it. It is called methodology because it is a method of doing projects. Those methodologies are frameworks that should be brought into Nigeria. There is a need to teach Nigeria project managers these things and work with them in order to know how to apply these frameworks. Once you know how to apply these frameworks and the methodologies, your project will succeed. In Nigeria, we just do it. But there is a way to start, control, manage, deliver and close a project. Once those things are learnt and followed, a project manager will succeed.

You talked about the uniqueness of CIPMN’s courses. Can you tell us what makes them special?

There are about five to six levels of accreditation or licensing. Each level covers certain areas of project management from when you are a certified student project manager to when you are a certified fellow project manager or professional manager. We have designed a curriculum that takes you all the way from planning, risk management, design thinking, sustainability to delivering international projects. All of these come into our courses as you progress to the chain, we have all it takes to deliver onto you what is needed for that level of licensing. One thing is that it covers all aspects of production because project management is not just construction. We have IT project management, financial services project management, retail project management and healthcare. There is a project in every sector of the economy and the skillset to be able to deliver projects in every sector of the economy is what we have put into our programme. So, you cannot finish and say I can only deliver construction project. No, you can deliver all projects. We can take as many individuals as possible.   The process that we have for carrying out our training is scaleable and the strategies have been set already. To come in as a chartered member is N250,000, associate member is N150,000, graduate member is N50,000 and student member is N20,000. You cannot come in as a chartered member if you are still in school or you are a fresh graduate. It won’t work. There are requirements.

Strategy

Our job is to deliver a certain strategy. We need proper planning, requirement gathering to ensure you understand what the challenges are and put in place what will solve these challenges, not what you think will solve the challenges. There should be resource management and change management or contract. He needs to plan what will be done in the healthcare sector and how to deliver it. If he finds out that what he is doing isn’t working, he shouldn’t say we have already started, let’s just finish. He should stop it at that point and restrategise.