Developing Historical Projects’ Database for Nigerian Oil & Gas Sector-Status, the Imperatives and the New Normal

In today’s competitive business environment every effort and opportunity to improve a company’s capital projects process cycle needs to be explored. It is surprising that since we found oil in Nigeria, there has not been a functional and robust project historical database (owned by the industry) – containing key metrics on: cost, schedule, risk, scope, lessons learnt, etc. The IOCs have theirs but the owner-side is still yet to wake up! This article will propose a way to implement a National Project historical database (NPHDB) system for the Nigerian Oil and Gas sector. The collection of costs, schedules, resources, and technical data from completed projects can facilitate the development of benchmarks, ratios, factors, and other statistical analyses to measure and evaluate project performance and quality. Over time, if we introduce and properly use a project historical database system, individual project performance, as well as corporate decision making in choosing the best projects to pursue, will improve. The proposed National Historical Project Database system for the oil sector will assist the owner project management team (government agencies supervising the government interests in the oil and gas sector) to select the right projects to do in the first place, and then to properly execute the selected projects. The premise of this Paper is that the implementation of a project historical database system will allow the oil sector to improve their project processes in light of the total corporate capital budget and capital management efficiency. You can't improve if you don't know where you've been and how you got there. ‘The sooner we can get started capturing data the better; we shouldn’t let good projects pass us by’.