A Project Management and Monitoring IT System for project management by Asian Development Bank (ADB) was launched in Colombo last Monday at Hotel Galadari Colombo.
The system was developed and tailor made to Sri Lanka for project management purposes specially to monitor project progress with the assistance under the Technical Assistance Program (TA-8562 SRI) for “Capacity Development for Project Implementation for the Government of Sri Lanka” by ADB.
The Project Management and Contract Management IT System was ceremonially launched in Sri Lanka by the Minister of City Planning and Water Supply Rauf Hakeem.
The Project Management and Contract Management IT System will first be launched for water sector projects and will be replicated to other projects and sectors on requests. Representatives from various government institutions including Ministry of City Planning and Water Supply, National Water Supply and Drainage Board, Department of Project Management and Monitoring and Asian Development bank were present in the gathering.
Government of Sri Lanka and ADB have identified that most of the donor funded projects experienced severe delays, cost overruns and disputes. This situation resulted in Government of Sri Lanka incurring additional costs, prolongation of social and environmental impacts during construction, contractors facing cash flow problems and depriving the general public the use of infrastructure facilities for years and underutilization of foreign funds.
Insufficient capacity in project management and contract management skills, have been identified as a key contributory factor for these negative impacts in projects implementations.
In the future contractors should update the project progress data to the online project management system and relevant Project Management Unit could approve or make variations. Top management including ministry secretaries are given a bird’s eye view of all projectsand all stakeholders are given view/edit/update permissions.
The development of the IT system took almost one and half years and the input of the relevant stake holders with particular emphasis has been incorporated by the developer MS Technologies a Sri Lankan software development company.
Project Management and Contract Management IT Systemhas 3 distinguish components. It has core project management software, document management system and correspondence management system. It also has included the templates required for 65 procedures explained in the guide for projects and contract management which the government is expected to publish in the near future.
Online real time contract management will reduce corruption and prolongation which has become a major downfall in Sri Lanka’s infrastructure development.
Relevant authorities can keep track of project progress details, tracking of contract execution and deadlines, identifying of bonds, commencements, variations and be early informed about the shortcomings on project delivery delays, senior management are regularly updated with the project progress are key benefits of the system.
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