There is a growing interest among governments to consider public-private partnerships (PPPs) for the possibility of bringing in new debt and equity sources of financing for funding public infrastructure needs that are paid back from the cash-flow generated by the project when it becomes operational. PPP projects might take 5 to 20 years to repay its project finance. Those government agencies need to have a robust and reliable PPP projects performance reporting to provide an auditable trust-worthy status of those projects’ milestone dates, attaining the agreed upon Key Performance Indicators (KPI), issues that need to be resolved, disputes that need to settled among others.
Although using a Project Management Information Systems (PMIS) like PMWeb will enable those government entities or authorities as well as the concessionaire to manage, monitor, evaluate and report on the performance of all project management processes need for PPP projects delivery, including schedule, financial, schedule, communications, risk, issues, quality, safety among other aspects, nevertheless, some government entities or authorities would like to start with a quick solution to provide a single version of the truth oversight reporting for their PPP projects’ performance. The document developed by the PPP Cell, Infrastructure Division, Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Government of India was used to provide an example of such a progress report.
Using the same PMWeb platform, a custom form will be created to enable the project team, who will be assigned to report the PPP project performance. The customs form will include different tables to capture the needed progress information. Two fields will be common for all those tables: the Responsibility and Status fields, for which the values for those fields will be predefined in a list to enable selecting the relevant value from those lists. The first table will be the PPP key milestone dates status. The table will have the PPP project stages and sub-stages predefined along with the original baseline milestone date. At the end of each project progress period, the assigned project team member will provide the target or forecast completion date with an “A” indicator if it was an actual date. Also, there will be a field to add remarks on why there was a change in the actual milestone completion date.
It is highly recommended to attach the updated project schedule reports and other documents that provided the basis for reporting those milestone dates’ current status. Those documents will be uploaded and stored in the PMWeb document management repository, where a folder will be created for each said progress period.
The report will also include tables to report the status of activities, which are the authority’s responsibility and the concessionaire’s responsibility. The reported data in those two tables will detail the activity, status, responsibility, planned and target or actual date, the reason for the delay, and action to complete the activity. The report will also include a table to provide details of payment receipts, payment mechanism, and escrow account operations.
The report will also include additional five tables to report on other aspects of the PPP project. Those have the status of required project approvals, PPP project performance KPIs, performance concerns, issues that need resolution, and status of disputes. The standard field for all those tables is the responsibility field to ensure accountability for all reported actions and events. Similar to all other reported performance or events, supportive documents need to be uploaded and attached to the progress form.
The preparation and providing the PPP performance report data will involve multiple project team members with different roles and responsibilities. Accordingly, the tables that are part of the PPP performance report will be assigned to their relevant project team member to complete. This is achievable in PMWeb custom form builder where it allows assigning who can view, edit or view and edit the data included in those tables as well as other fields included in the PPP performance report.
In case there is a need to have a predefined sequence for completing the PPP performance report, including the final review and approval of what has been reported, PMWeb workflow will be used to map those steps. The duration allotted to each step and the project team member who has been assigned the step. This will provide an auditable trust-worthy track record of reported performance for the complete PPP project life cycle stages and sub-stages.
