Project Governance Analysis: Greece-Italy Tunnel Project

This essay provides a comprehensive analysis of a major construction project connecting Greece and Italy, which, despite significant funding, faced substantial delays and cost overruns. The project is examined through the lens of project governance, leadership, and stakeholder theory. The essay delves into the strategic and technical challenges encountered, including the absence of effective leadership and standardized project execution. It explores the crucial role of project governance in ensuring project success, the institutions responsible for governance within the project, and proposes strategic and technical recommendations for similar projects, such as the implementation of stakeholder theory and a quality management team. The analysis highlights the importance of accountability, stakeholder engagement, risk management, and management control processes in achieving project objectives. The essay concludes by emphasizing the significance of a robust project governance structure for future projects to mitigate risks and ensure successful outcomes.

Running head: PROJECT GOVERNANCE
Analysis of a project leader
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Introduction
This project is about a construction development that lasted over the years 2010 to
2018 where the project was undertaken for creating a connection between Greece and Italy
with the help of an underground tunnel. This was one of the largest funded construction
projects ever undertaken. However the project was completed and it was found that after
completion the analysis of the project after the project closure face declared that the project
was behind schedule and also over budgeted (Musawir, Serra, Zwikael & Ali, 2017). This is
why there was a father analysis to find out how the organisation was laughing the lead from a
senior management and ministerial ownership from the Government of Greece and Italy and
also how each of the members within the project way responsible for the issues created
within the organisation. It was also required to be found out how the project was technically
and strategically challenge with no recommendation provided to the project leaders to deal
with the situations. All of these would be described in detail in the essay as following with
the importance of project government playing a crucial role in project success, the institution
responsible for the project governance within this project and the recommendations made for
similar projects experiencing the issues at both strategic and Technical level.
1. Purpose and aims
The purpose of this project is to develop a probable recommendation for projects like
this with high budget implementation and yet lacking a proper guide to ensure governance
within the project team. The aim is to find out the issues that the project was facing both
technically and strategically and at the same time, how the project can induce a proper
leadership and governance.

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2. Description of assessment
The project is related to the development of the connection between Greece and Italy
with the help of an underground tunnel in Eastern Europe during the time of 2010 to 2018. It
was the largest undertaken private funded construction project which requires the cooperation
of two particular national governments bankers for finding the project and other contractors
and regulatory agencies. The construction and Engineering of this particular channel for the
construction project was in the need of new technologies to be included and also required
significant modifications during the entire project so that any unpredicted and unexpected
conditions ok changes might be required by the different stakeholders of the organisations.
Even if the project was completed, it was found that the project was both behind schedule and
over budgeted.
The promotion was even extremely challenging because of the project being involved
with different nations at the same time and transactions where made from different institution
spanning over several countries. In 2009, the report presented that it was due to the inactivity
of the senior Project leader because the project had several difficult experiences leading to
failure in acquiring the milestones. For this particular problem, the project has to be
rescheduled and the project failures have to be removed several times between 2013 and
2016. The primary success factors of the project was also not aligned as per the strategic
priorities by Italian Government and the Greek government. There was no senior
management involved in the ministry ownership and therefore the leadership negatively
influence the stakeholders within the organisation further affecting the project sponsors and
other problems started to creep into the project.
The project was both strategically and technically challenged as there was clearly no
project execution standardized and there was also requirement of governance policy for
professionally setting standardization throughout the entire project plan fixing the day-to-day

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activities of each project team member restricted during the entire schedule of the project.
Due to all this problems, the project was both behind schedule and over budget, which means
the project cannot be regarded as a successful one.
3. One or a combination of governance theories to analyse the situation
How project governance plays a crucial role in project success
Project governance is a concept that provide function which is aligning to the
governance model of an organisation that goes throughout the life cycle of a particular project
(Samset & Volden, 2016). In simple terms, it allows a project manager to decide a structure
of the project and follow strict rules according to the governance and policies and procedures
of the organisation to make decisions accordingly deciding the processes within the project
and also for selecting specific tools for managing and controlling the project.
Project governance is extremely important and critical to every project because for
complex and high budget project procedures, it is required that project communication and
documentation is consistent according to the project practices and the entire project follows a
strict framework so that the data or information generated for every following day in the
project would define the roles and responsibilities and liabilities of every project team
member including the project manager (Musawir, Abd-Karim & Mohd-Danuri, 2020). This
standardization rule helps the project in deciding whether the progression of the project so far
has been aligning to the standardized rules and regulations. Now this comes into action when
the analysis of the project progress and done so far is for the provided for a quality analysis
(Sirisomboonsuk, Gu, Cao & Burns, 2018). This is the responsibility of the project manager
to develop a quality team for the project who would be responsible for checking the quality of
the project analysing every work done step by step within the project for ensuring that the end
product is of standardized quality.

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There is no way that this particular procedure cannot ensure the quality of the project
as it will not only provide the information about standardized procedures applied in the
project but also would ensure that the project is within the schedule and budget (Derakhshan,
Turner & Mancini, 2019). Project success and failure is depend upon several components of
project governance as the following are the components which add value to the project
ensuring project success:
 Governance models and theories which depends on the scope, time,
stakeholder, complexity of a project and also the importance of the project to
the organisation (Haq, Liang, Gu, Du and Zhao, 2018). This ensures that the
changes in the project by ensuring a governance framework provides steps in
the project which are compulsory for making it a standardized one.
 It also ensures accountability and responsibilities of the project team members
within the organisation defining why a project manager need to ensure the
accountability members and also which team members are responsible,
consulted and share information with each other about the project deliverables
(Joslin, 2016).
 Project governance helps in engaging the stakeholders to be invested within
the project team so that the interests and prospects of the stakeholders are also
taken into account within the project progression and how feasible
communication can be set (Joslin & Müller, 2016).
 It helps in risk and issue management sharing the risk and issues are old
managed efficiently and also brings about the delivery confidence of the
project to be done before time and within the budget (MülleR, 2016).
 Project governance also ensure that the management control process is
implemented within the project.

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What institutions are responsible for project governance?
According to this particular project, both the Governance of Italy and Greece are
responsible for not ensuring the project managers with an effective leading model that would
ensure that the project has a proper governance set for controlling the project activities so that
it remains within the budget and is completed before time (Kivilä, Martinsuo & Vuorinen,
2017).
In addition to that the project managers and all the project stakeholders are associated
with the responsibility of not completing the project on time as without a proper governance
they would not have the ability to identify the quality of work that they are representing for
the project.
Recommendations for similar projects experiencing these issues at both strategic and
technical levels
The technical errors that were found in this particular case about not ensuring the
effective team integration between the clients, the suppliers and supply chain can be e
provided with the stakeholder theory. This theory ensures the central focus on all the issues
concerning the stakeholders within the Institution. This particular theory of corporate
governance stipulates the corporate entity and see how it invariably required to have a
balance between the interest of the different stakeholders within the project and also the level
of satisfaction that they would have by providing the services.
There can also be a strategic implementation of the stakeholder theory implemented
within any project suffering from going over budget is to have random meetings set at several
intervals to find out how the project is been carried out. With specific meeting over the
schedule and budget, any occurrence of risk can be mitigated on time and there can be a

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further preceding to complete the project in time by bringing in changes to the existing
structure of the project planning.
A quality management team can be implemented within the organisation so that at
every step of the project, the standardization maintenance can be checked and if it is found
that the project is not following the standardized quality, it would change the procedures and
implement new dedicated network structure to complete the project in a synchronised
communicative way within the time and budget.
Conclusion
Therefore in conclusion it can be said that the project about building the connection
between Greece and Italy was going through several problems regarding the project
governance and strategic and Technical issues regarding the wrong leadership plan
acknowledged by the project stakeholders. This is why the above essay describe in details
about the different requirement of the organisation to represent a proper project governance
structure and also ensures how the project success factors can be implemented within an
organisation with the help of project governance by recommending few Strategies for any
upcoming project.

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References
Derakhshan, R., Turner, R., & Mancini, M. (2019). Project governance and stakeholders: a
literature review. International Journal of Project Management, 37(1), 98-116.
Haq, S.U., Liang, C., Gu, D., Du, J.T. and Zhao, S., 2018. Project governance, project
performance, and the mediating role of project quality and Project Management risk:
an agency theory perspective. Engineering Management Journal, 30(4), pp.274-292.
Joslin, R., & Müller, R. (2016). The relationship between project governance and project
success. International journal of project management, 34(4), 613-626.
Joslin, R., 2016. 10W Governance and Project Success. Governance and Governmentality for
Projects: Enablers, Practices, and Consequences, p.159.
Kivilä, J., Martinsuo, M., & Vuorinen, L. (2017). Sustainable project management through
project control in infrastructure projects. International Journal of Project
Management, 35(6), 1167-1183.
MülleR, R. (2016). Project governance. Advances in Project Management: Narrated
Journeys in Uncharted Territory, 33.
Samset, K., & Volden, G. H. (2016). Front-end definition of projects: Ten paradoxes and
some reflections regarding project management and project governance. International
Journal of Project Management, 34(2), 297-313.
Sirisomboonsuk, P., Gu, V. C., Cao, R. Q., & Burns, J. R. (2018). Relationships between
project governance and information technology governance and their impact on
project performance. International journal of project management, 36(2), 287-300.

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ul Musawir, A., Serra, C. E. M., Zwikael, O., & Ali, I. (2017). Project governance, benefit
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