Project Management faces many challenging problems, with many commissioned projects in developing countries ending up uncompleted, abandoned or unsustainable. Additionally, many projects do not meet customer expectations, with cost and schedule overruns quite common.

The growth of project management body of knowledge and the advancement of project managers’ capabilities in dealing with resources are crucial to the successful delivery of projects. We provide comprehensive project management services to help organizations plan, execute, and monitor projects efficiently. Our project management team has extensive experience in managing complex projects across various industries. We offer the following services:

• Project feasibility and scoping studies
• Project Planning, Scheduling and Design
• Project Implementation and Coordination
• Project Stakeholder Engagement and Management
• Project Risk Management
• Project Monitoring and Reporting
• Project Management Reviews
• Capacity Building in Project Management

By their very nature, investment projects involve benefits and costs over a number of years into the future. Market prices and project outcomes cannot be predicted with certainty. In addition, technical difficulties and delays in implementation frequently result in cost and time overruns. Project appraisal and project selection are key functions in the planning and allocation stages of public investment. Effective appraisal supports decision-making for optimization of project design and impact and is critical in selecting projects that yield the highest social and economic returns.

Working with our clients, we undertake a detailed and thorough evaluation that aims to assess the feasibility, viability, and potential of our clients’ proposed projects. Project appraisal involves a comprehensive analysis of various aspects of the project, such as its economic, financial, technical, social, management, and environmental factors. Project appraisal determines whether the project is suitable for investment and financing and whether it aligns with the organization’s goals and objectives. Our main phases of project appraisal encompass the following:

• Prefeasibility (also known as options appraisal): under which a study is prepared presenting the relevant alternatives to solve a given problem, risks are identified, and preliminary estimates of costs and benefits are provided; and
• Feasibility: which expands on the prefeasibility phase by refining data collection, providing detailed estimates of costs and benefits for the selected alternative, performing a detailed assessment of risks, and assessing environmental and social impacts.

Our appraisal studies take into account the following critical factors:

• Technical Feasibility: Assessing the technical aspects of the project, including engineering design, resource availability, technology requirements, and potential environmental and regulatory considerations.
• Financial Feasibility: Examining the project’s financial viability, including revenue forecasts, cost estimates, capital investment requirements, operating expenses, and financial indicators like return on investment (ROI) and payback period.
• Market Feasibility: Conducting a comprehensive market analysis to understand the target market, including its size, trends, competition, and potential demand for the project’s products or services.
• Legal and Regulatory Considerations: Examining the legal and regulatory framework relevant to the project, including permits, licenses, land acquisition, environmental regulations, and compliance requirements.
• Social and Environmental Impacts: Assessing the potential social and environmental effects of the project, including social license to operate, community impacts, environmental sustainability, and appropriate mitigation measures.

Project Management Offices (PMOs) and Enterprise Project Management Offices (EPMOs) serve as key functions within businesses, setting standards and expectations to aid in the management of projects. Virgon Africa offers PMO and EPMO establishment services using industry best practices to help organizations maintain long-term success.

A range of organizations are engaged in the production of evidence on the effects of health, social, and economic development programs on human welfare outcomes. However, evidence is often scattered around different databases, websites, and the gray literature, which is often presented in inaccessible formats. Lack of overview of the evidence in a specific field can be a barrier to the use of existing research and prevent efficient use of limited resources for new research. Evidence & Gap Maps (EGMs) aim to address these issues and complement existing synthesis and mapping approaches.

Using EGMs, we provide our clients with thematic collections of evidence structured around a framework which schematically represents the types of interventions and outcomes of relevance to a particular sector. By mapping the existing evidence using this framework, EGMs provide organizations with a visual overview of what they know and do not know about the effects of different programs. By providing links to user-friendly summaries of relevant studies, EGMs can facilitate the use of existing evidence for decision making in organizations. They identify key “gaps” where little or no evidence from impact evaluations and systematic reviews is available and can be a valuable resource to inform a strategic approach to building the evidence base in a particular sector. Our other evidence synthesis methodologies include rapid evidence synthesis, scoping reviews and systematic reviews.