In South Africa, the Industrial Policy Action Plan serves as a blueprint for the envisaged industrial development in South Africa. It is therefore critical that infrastructure, manufacturing, and special economic zone incentive programmes is designed and developed on the basis of sustainable project management entailing that there is a logical relationship between project time, scope, schedule and quality management. The study is based on the role that project, programme and operations management methodologies can play in terms of creating a climate conducive towards sustainable industrialisation in South Africa. It focusses on industrial development funding, the soft and hard manufacturing and critical infrastructure projects as well as special economic zones. It examines the efficiency and effectiveness of the investment reimbursement programmes within the dti and Industrial Development Corporation; to which project and programme management is applied during the life of the programmes, looking at the synchronisation between project budget, schedule, scope and quality of processing project for funding,  as well as the application of programme management at a high-level entailing the leading, creating, implementing and improving of portfolios of project and business management processes  delivering goods and services in the organisational value chain, aiming  to achieving benefits of strategic importance, Steyn(2009).