The project of water PPP procurement in Coastia was clearly a failure for a number of reasons. However, the importance of the PPP project for the country and the scale of the initiative suggest that the project could have been saved if more attention was dedicated to the development and procurement stages. Therefore, if the PPP Officer undertook several steps during the PPP process, some of the problems that eventually led to the failure of the project could have been avoided.
Firstly, the absence of effective progress controls and a monitoring mechanism was one of the reasons of the PPP not becoming a success. As monitoring is one of the cornerstones of project management, the absence of control mechanisms allowed the Operator to neglect contractual obligations for three years until PPP termination (Schwalbe, 2011). If the PPP Project Officer was more actively involved in creating both clear targets and monitoring the progress timeline the failure of the project could have been potentially avoided. Moreover, in case the project was not viable from the beginning, monitoring mechanisms could have allowed participants to terminate the contract early on, thus saving resources and time.
The cooperation between CWA and Operator is another issue of major concern for the project. As CWA was assigned the role of the PPP Project Officer, it was very hard to avoid the conflict of interest between CWA and Operator (Zwikael and Smyrk, 2011). Hence, in some cases Operator was sabotaged by CWA, which is completely unacceptable for such a project. Therefore, it could have been beneficial to hire an external Project Officer or to invite third party consultants that could help to streamline relationships between CWA and Operator.
Lastly, the absence of competition for the project was an alarming sign, which was ignored by the Project Officer. The apparent lack of interest to the project from other contestants demonstrated that contract conditions were either not feasible or unattractive. At this stage the Project Officer should have investigate the reasons for low interest in the project and altered conditions in a way that would make it more attractive for other bidders, thus maintaining a higher level of competition during the procurement process.
Schwalbe, K., 2011. Information Technology Project Management. 6th ed. Boston, MA:
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Zwikael, O. and Smyrk, J., 2011. Project Management for the Creation of Organisational
Value. London, UK: Springer-Verlag London Limited.
