William Mpye remembers the moment clearly. Early in his career as a project manager at Eskom, the power utility, he watched a newly connected house or homestead come to life with electricity for the first time. “I saw the impact that effective public sector project management can have on the lives of ordinary people every time we handed over a newly connected house or homestead,” he said. That memory still shapes how he thinks about his work today.
For millions of South Africans, the gap between government promise and government delivery is not abstract. When a water system breaks down, when a clinic cannot open on time, when promised infrastructure never arrives, the cost is immediate and personal. Families waiting on housing programmes do not read policy documents. They know whether they received a house. People navigating public services do not study digital transformation strategies. They know whether they can access what they need online.
That gap is what a new initiative is designed to close. The Project Management Institute sub-Saharan Africa, the University of South Africa Graduate School of Business Leadership, the South African Revenue Service, the Project Management Office in the Presidency, and other public sector partners launched the Public Sector Project Management Community of Practice, known as PSPMCoP, on July 30 at the University of South Africa Graduate School of Business Leadership in Midrand.
George Asamani, managing director of PMI sub-Saharan Africa, framed the stakes plainly. “Across Africa and the whole world, governments should keep the promises they make to citizens. As project management professionals, we want to help leaders bring these promises to life,” he said. “This PSPMCoP is not only about strengthening the project management profession, but also about ensuring that government is capable of delivering consistently, transparently and effectively for the people of South Africa.”
The pressures on government institutions have multiplied. New technologies, climate change, cybersecurity threats, expanding digital services, and aging infrastructure all overlap and interact, making projects harder to predict and execute. Yet PMI research shows that complexity alone is not the barrier. Organisations that manage complexity well are five times more likely to deliver successful projects. The difference lies in capability and approach.
The highest-performing government organisations are not those with fewer challenges, Asamani explained. They are those where leaders align priorities early, engage stakeholders, anticipate change, and build capabilities that adapt as circumstances shift.
By contrast, when those foundations are absent, even well-funded projects stall, overspend, or simply fail to reach the people they were meant to serve.
Mpye, now group executive and Enterprise Programme Management Office head at SARS, sees project management as something far more consequential than an administrative function. “Project management is not a technical discipline on the margins of government. It must be a strategic capability embedded in the centre of government and public administration,” he said. “Well-run projects turn policy into action, translate strategies into outcomes and transform vision into national progress.”
The community of practice is built on a straightforward idea: what one department learns, others should not have to discover the hard way. “This community of practice is about sharing what has been learned and developing capabilities. It is about combining the expertise of different organisations to ensure lessons from the whole group are captured, we learn from one another and we strengthen delivery across institutional bodies,” Asamani said. “This community of practice is about transforming individual experience into institutional knowledge.”
South Africa confronts simultaneous demands: accelerating infrastructure, improving service outcomes, modernising public institutions, and delivering services more transparently. Each of those demands runs through projects. When those projects fail, citizens pay the cost directly.
The capabilities built through PSPMCoP are intended to outlast individual projects, political cycles, and administrations. Mpye put the measure of success simply: “We must measure our effectiveness not on our activities, but on the outcomes we achieve. We must be accountable not for delivery of a project, but for the outcomes and outputs it achieves.”
Whether that accountability takes hold across South Africa’s public institutions, and whether ordinary people begin to feel the difference, remains the open question the community of practice was built to answer.