Construction Project Management

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A detailed course tailoring the PMBOK guide from construction projects perspective.

Projects in general, and construction projects particularly, goes through different stages from their inception to their closeout. In the simplest terms, a typical project starts as a “concept” which develops with time going through different phases such as designing, bidding, procuring, executing, controlling, and closing. Each of these phases without the application of a proper management can open a door for project failure. In fact, any construction project involves many stakeholders, resources, conflicting objectives, constraints, activities, deadlines, budget limit, risks, uncertainties, etc., which necessitates their proper management, planning, monitoring, and controlling. Thus, “construction project management” provides valuable processes, tools, and techniques to ensure a project success by meeting the project desired objectives.

In this course, you’ll be familiarized with essential details of how to successfully manage a construction project. The course follows the different project management “groups”, “knowledge areas”, and “processes” according to the PMBOK® Guide, however, from a “construction” project perspective. Despite that, a lot of the course contents are also applicable to “non-construction” projects. The course is designed to target those without any background of project management or construction project management. In other words, it starts from scratch. However, it can also be useful to those with project management background to either refresh their memory, or to address potentially missing concepts (i.e. depending on your needs). The course is divided into 14 sections that are briefly described as follows:

In “Section 1” you’ll be introduced to basic project management concepts such as the different project management groups, knowledge areas, and processes, as well as the different project stakeholders and project lifecycle stages. In “Section 2” the different project strategies which includes different contract types, elements, and clauses as well as different project delivery systems will be discussed in details. Followed by that, “Section 3” will describe the steps of project planning including how to develop a work breakdown structure, organization breakdown structure, and responsibility assignment matrix and how to define the logical relationships between the project’s activities and to graphically illustrate them. “Section 4” will be based on “Section 3” in which you’ll understand how to schedule your project using different scheduling techniques and how to determine the critical path and the project duration. In “Section 5” the major different project resources will be defined and their management processes will be discussed in details. This includes, labor management, equipment management, materials management, and site space management. To bid for a project, “Section 6” will go in details of the bidding process and explains how to develop a balanced bid and an unbalanced bid. To cost estimate your project before bidding, “Section 7” will discuss in details the estimating process and the different types of estimating methods that are applied at different project stages. In “Section 8”, the development and forecasting of a project cash flow and net cash flow profiles will be discussed in details. This will be accompanied with important practical considerations to increase the accuracy of the forecasting process. Construction risks are common, thus, in “Section 9” the detailed process of risk management including risk identification, analysis (qualitatively and quantitatively), allocating, responding, and monitoring and controlling will be discussed. Consequently, in “Section 10”, important aspects of project monitoring and controlling will be discussed. This includes measuring the work progress, earned value analysis, and schedule updating. In “Section 11”, an overview of the basic concepts of project crashing or acceleration and time-cost tradeoff will be discussed. Meeting the project’s quality requirement is a very important objective of project management, accordingly, in “Section 12” the process of quality management including quality planning, quality assurance, and quality control will be discussed. Executing a project without considering safety is a big failure to the construction firm, therefore, in “Section 13” the important elements of project safety management along with how to measure your company’s safety performance will be discussed. Finally, in “Section 14”, a real-life construction case study will be discussed to illustrate and learn how not applying or inadequately applying the principles of project management can lead to an unfortunate project failure.

All of these different topics are highly interrelated, correlated, and should be integrated to deliver a successful project, and this is what the course aims for. In other words, whenever we move from a topic to another, the link and connection between these topics will be emphasized. The topics to be covered will be accompanied with more than 60 carefully selected examples solved in details to ensure you understand the concept.

Finally, the course may be “lengthy” but “worthy”. Best wishes and good luck.

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