Golf Club Management

Lesson 10: Project management

Goal: plan, monitor and control a club project, and explain the research on why projects run late and over budget.

A project is not business as usual

A project is temporary work with a defined start, end and result: a clubhouse refurbishment, an irrigation upgrade, a solar installation, a new club management system, hosting a provincial championship or a televised Sunshine Tour event. Operations are the ongoing work of running the club. Projects need their own structure because they cut across departments and compete with daily work for the same people.

Two widely used frameworks:

• PMBOK Guide (Project Management Institute, 7th edition, 2021): principle-based, describing performance domains such as stakeholders, planning, delivery, measurement and uncertainty.
• PRINCE2 (AXELOS, 7th edition, 2023): process-based, widely used in the UK, in South African government and by large contractors. It stresses a business case that must stay valid throughout, defined roles and management by stages.

Both work for clubs. The size of the project should set how much of either you use.

The project life cycle

1. Initiate: the business case. Why are we doing this, what are the options (including doing nothing), what are the costs, benefits and risks? Who is the sponsor (usually a board member or the GM)?
2. Plan: scope, schedule, budget, risks, procurement, communication.
3. Execute: do the work, manage contractors, keep stakeholders informed.
4. Monitor and control: track progress against plan, manage changes, act on variances.
5. Close: hand over, confirm benefits, settle contracts, record the lessons learned.

Planning tools

• Scope statement: what’s in and, just as important, what’s out.
• Work breakdown structure (WBS): the project broken into deliverables, then work packages small enough to estimate and assign.
• Schedule: a Gantt chart showing tasks, durations and dependencies. The critical path is the longest chain of dependent tasks: any delay on it delays the project.
• Budget: built from the work packages, plus a contingency (often 10 to 20% for building work) held by the sponsor.
• RACI chart: who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed for each deliverable.
• Risk register: see Lesson 11.

Monitor and control

Control means comparing actual progress to the plan and acting on the difference. Report on:

• Schedule: milestones achieved versus planned.
• Cost: spent and committed versus budget. Earned value analysis (comparing the value of work done with the money spent) gives an early warning on larger projects.
• Scope changes: every change request is logged and approved (or refused) by the sponsor, with its cost and time impact. Uncontrolled “while we’re at it” additions, called scope creep, are a classic cause of overruns in clubhouse projects.
• Risks and issues: new risks, and risks that have become issues.

A one-page status report using RAG (red, amber, green) ratings for schedule, cost, scope and risk is enough for the board.

Why projects overrun

• The planning fallacy: people underestimate how long their own tasks will take, even when they know similar tasks took longer in the past (Buehler, Griffin and Ross, 1994). Evidence: strong research base.
• Optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation: Flyvbjerg (2014) found that large projects overrun in the great majority of cases, through both honest optimism and the deliberate understating of costs to win approval. His remedy is reference class forecasting: base estimates on the actual outcomes of similar past projects, not on this project’s plan.
• Success is more than the iron triangle. Atkinson (1999) argued that judging projects only on cost, time and quality ignores whether they delivered benefits to users. A clubhouse finished on time and on budget that members don’t use is a failure.

In the clubhouse: a solar and battery project

Critical view

• Formal project methods can bury small projects in paperwork. Tailor them: a R150,000 bunker project needs a one-page plan, not a PRINCE2 board.
• Agile methods (short cycles, frequent feedback) suit some club projects better, such as a new website or app, than a fixed upfront plan.

Seminar questions

1. Why do clubhouse refurbishments so often run over budget? Use Flyvbjerg and the planning fallacy.
2. Who should be the sponsor of a major club project: the president, a director, or the GM?
3. How would you judge whether a completed project was a success, beyond time and cost?

Workplace task 10

Choose a project your club is planning or has just done. Write a one-page business case and a WBS to two levels, and identify the critical path. If the project is finished, compare its actual time and cost with the original estimate.

Watch

• What is project management? (Association for Project Management)

Sources

• Atkinson (1999), Project management: cost, time and quality, two best guesses and a phenomenon, International Journal of Project Management
• AXELOS (2023), Managing Successful Projects with PRINCE2, 7th edition
• Buehler, Griffin and Ross (1994), Exploring the “planning fallacy”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
• Flyvbjerg (2014), What you should know about megaprojects and why, Project Management Journal
• Project Management Institute (2021), A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide), 7th edition
• Engineering News (2024), Leading Johannesburg golf club has implemented solar power system; SAPVIA, Solarise Africa partners with Royal Johannesburg and Kensington Golf Club

Draft module material for the PGA of South Africa Director of Golf certificate, for discussion. South African law applies throughout. It is general education, not legal or financial advice: Acts, regulations and codes change, so check the current version and take advice before acting on them.