Ask most people why an EPC project in Nigeria's oil and gas sector runs late, and the assumption is usually technical: a design flaw, a construction error, equipment that didn't perform. After a decade of project delivery — rising from Project Engineer to COO/Projects Director, and a further decade since running an engineering company of my own — I'd put it differently. The engineering is rarely where these projects actually lose time.
They lose time at the handoffs.
The gap between disciplines, not within them
Engineering, procurement, and construction are usually staffed, scheduled, and managed as three distinct functions, often by three different teams with three different reporting lines. Each one can perform well in isolation and the project can still fall behind, because delay accumulates in the gaps between them — the week procurement waits for a final drawing revision, the days construction sits idle waiting for materials that were ordered late, the rework triggered when a field condition wasn't communicated back to design in time.
None of these are engineering failures. They're coordination failures, and they're far harder to spot in a project schedule than a design error, because nobody owns the gap itself.
What changes when one person owns the full sequence
Having moved through cost and design engineering before taking on projects director responsibilities, I've seen both sides of this. When delivery oversight sits with someone who has visibility across design, procurement, and construction simultaneously — not just authority over one phase — those handoff gaps shrink considerably, because decisions get made with the next phase in mind rather than in isolation.
This is less about hierarchy and more about information flow. A procurement decision made without visibility into the construction schedule downstream will optimize for the wrong thing. A design decision made without visibility into what's actually available to procure will need rework later. The projects that move fastest are the ones where this information moves continuously, not just at scheduled review meetings.
Where this shows up most in Nigeria specifically
- Import lead times for specialized equipment mean procurement decisions need to be made earlier than the project schedule often allows for, which means design needs to firm up specifications sooner than is comfortable.
- Site conditions across different regions — coastal versus inland, urban versus more remote depot locations — affect construction sequencing in ways that need to feed back into design assumptions quickly, not after the fact.
- Multiple regulatory and safety sign-offs at different project stages mean documentation handoffs between teams need to be airtight, since a gap here stalls the whole project, not just one phase.
The practical takeaway
If a project is running behind, the instinct is usually to look at whichever phase is currently active — is construction slow, is procurement late. The more useful question is almost always about the phase before it: was design specific enough, early enough, for procurement to move when it needed to? Was procurement sequenced with construction's actual needs in mind, not just contractual milestones?
Fixing EPC delivery timelines in this sector has very little to do with making any one discipline faster. It has everything to do with making the boundaries between them less costly to cross.