SAP培训：http://www.51sap.cn the international arena may also affect their capacities and vitality to provide services in the domestic U.S. market.
Contractor Financed Projects
Increasingly, some owners look to contractors or joint ventures as a resource to design, to build and to finance a constructed facility. For example, a utility company may seek a consortium consisting of a design/construct firm and a financial investment firm to assume total liability during construction and thereby eliminate the risks of cost escalation to ratepayers, stockholders and the management. On the other hand, a local sanitation district may seek such a consortium to provide private ownership for a proposed new sewage treatment plant. In the former case, the owner may take over the completed facility and service the debt on construction through long-term financing arrangements; in the latter case, the private owner may operate the
completed facility and recover its investment through user fees. The activities of joint ventures among design, construction and investment firms are sometimes referred to as financial engineering.
This type of joint venture has become more important in the international construction market where aggressive contractors often win contracts by offering a more attractive financing package rather than superior technology. With a deepening shadow of international debts in recent years, many developing countries are not in a position to undertake any new project without contractor-backed financing. Thus, the contractors or joint ventures in overseas projects are forced into very risky positions if they intend to stay in the competition. Back to top
1.9 The Role of Project Managers
In the project life cycle, the most influential factors affecting the outcome of the project often reside at the early stages. At this point, decisions should be
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SAP培训：http://www.51sap.cn based on competent economic evaluation with due consideration for adequate financing, the prevalent social and regulatory environment, and technological considerations. Architects and engineers might specialize in planning, in construction field management, or in operation, but as project managers, they must have some familiarity with all such aspects in order to understand properly their role and be able to make competent decisions.
Since the 1970's, many large-scale projects have run into serious problems of management, such as cost overruns and long schedule delays. Actually, the management of megaprojects or superprojects is not a practice peculiar to our time. Witness the construction of transcontinental railroads in the Civil War era and the construction of the Panama Canal at the turn of this century. Although the megaprojects of this generation may appear in greater frequency and present a new set of challenge, the problems are organizational rather than technical. As noted by Hardy Cross: [6]
It is customary to think of engineering as a part of a trilogy, pure science, applied science and engineering. It needs emphasis that this trilogy is only one of a triad of trilogies into which engineering fits. This first is pure science, applied science and engineering; the second is economic theory, finance and engineering; and the third is social relations, industrial relations and engineering. Many engineering problems are as closely allied to social problems as they are to pure science.
As engineers advance professionally, they often spend as much or more time on planning, management and other economic or social problems as on the traditional engineering design and analysis problems which form the core of most educational programs. It is upon the ability of engineers to tackle all such problems that their performance will ultimately be judged.
The greatest stumbling block to effective management in construction is the inertia and historic divisions among planners, designers and constructors. While technical competence in design and innovation remains the foundation
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SAP培训：http://www.51sap.cn of engineering practice, the social, economic and organizational factors that are pervasive in influencing the success and failure of construction projects must also be dealt with effectively by design and construction organizations. Of course, engineers are not expected to know every detail of management techniques, but they must be knowledgeable enough to anticipate the problems of management so that they can work harmoniously with
professionals in related fields to overcome the inertia and historic divisions. Paradoxically, engineers who are creative in engineering design are often innovative in planning and management since both types of activities involve problem solving. In fact, they can reinforce each other if both are included in the education process, provided that creativity and innovation instead of routine practice are emphasized. A project manager who is well educated in the fundamental principles of engineering design and management can usefully apply such principles once he or she has acquired basic
understanding of a new application area. A project manager who has been trained by rote learning for a specific type of project may merely gain one year of experience repeated twenty times even if he or she has been in the field for twenty years. A broadly educated project manager can reasonably hope to become a leader in the profession; a narrowly trained project manager is often relegated to the role of his or her first job level permanently.
The owners have much at stake in selecting a competent project manager and in providing her or him with the authority to assume responsibility at various stages of the project regardless of the types of contractual agreements for implementing the project. Of course, the project manager must also possess the leadership quality and the ability to handle effectively intricate interpersonal relationships within an organization. The ultimate test of the education and experience of a project manager for construction lies in her or his ability to apply fundamental principles to solving problems in the new and unfamiliar situations which have become the hallmarks of the changing environment in the construction industry. Back to top
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SAP培训：http://www.51sap.cn 1.10 References
1. Au, T. and C. Hendrickson, \
Management,\Proceedings of the ASCE Conference on Civil Engineering Education, Columbus, Ohio, 1985.
2. Barrie, D.S. (editor), Directions in Managing Construction, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1981.
3. Bonny, J.B. and J.P. Frein, Handbook of Construction Management and Organization, 2nd Edition, Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., New York, 1980. 4. Hasagawa, Fumio et.al., \5. Lang, J.E. and D.Q. Mills, The Construction Industry, Lexington Books, Lexington, MA, 1979.
6. Walker, N., E.N. Walker and T.K. Rohdenburg, Legal Pitfalls in Architecture, Engineering and Building Construction, 2nd Edition, McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York, 1979. Back to top
1.11 Footnotes
1. The Business Roundtable, More Construction for the Money, Summary Report of the Construction Industry Cost Effectiveness Project, January 1983, p. 11. Back
2. \Engineering News-Record, April 4, 1985, pp. 30-37. Back
3. See Hendrickson, C., \Civil Engineering, Vol. 53, No. 2, February 1983, pp. 71-72. Back
4. The graph is derived from data in \1960-1983\Statistical Abstract of the United States, 105th Edition, U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, 1985, pp. 722-723, as well as the information in earlier editions. Back
5. See Petzinger, Thomas Jr., \Stuns its Older Rivals,\Wall Street Journal, p. 1, c. 6, Nov. 20, 1985. Back 6. See H. Cross, Engineers and Ivory Towers, McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., New York, 1952. Back
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2. Organizing for Project Management
2.1 What is Project Management?
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SAP培训：http://www.51sap.cn The management of construction projects requires knowledge of modern management as well as an understanding of the design and construction process. Construction projects have a specific set of objectives and constraints such as a required time frame for completion. While the relevant technology, institutional arrangements or processes will differ, the
management of such projects has much in common with the management of similar types of projects in other specialty or technology domains such as aerospace, pharmaceutical and energy developments.
Generally, project management is distinguished from the general
management of corporations by the mission-oriented nature of a project. A project organization will generally be terminated when the mission is accomplished. According to the Project Management Institute, the discipline of project management can be defined as follows: [1]
Project management is the art of directing and coordinating human and material resources throughout the life of a project by using modern management techniques to achieve predetermined objectives of scope, cost, time, quality and participation satisfaction.
By contrast, the general management of business and industrial corporations assumes a broader outlook with greater continuity of operations. Nevertheless, there are sufficient similarities as well as differences between the two so that modern management techniques developed for general management may be adapted for project management.
The basic ingredients for a project management framework [2] may be represented schematically in Figure 2-1. A working knowledge of general management and familiarity with the special knowledge domain related to the project are indispensable. Supporting disciplines such as computer science and decision science may also play an important role. In fact, modern management practices and various special knowledge domains have absorbed various techniques or tools which were once identified only with the
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