School of PE Blog

Introduction

Completion and delivery of any civil engineering project within the scheduled time frame is a great challenge. Despite availability of technological advances and committed budgets, people oriented skill applications remains an important domain in the construction industry. This will at large explain the significance of trained civil engineers and building management team in construction industry. Several reports and different studies demonstrated that the shared technical know-how in civil engineering applications, designing and management practices play an important role in timely delivery of projects more successfully than traditional means. Project planning and scheduling in PE exam review course recaps delivery methods of projects. With emerging new economies worldwide, the demand for space for commercial, residential and recreational projects are increasing astronomically year after year. Subsequently the increase in construction activities is challenging the planet natural resources and the environment. Further construction related activities adding several tons of material waste and polluting air with fine chemicals particulate matter. It is very important to innovate and adopt planet friendly commercial civil engineering project construction methods that have minimal impact on the environment and maximum expected life cycle of projects.

Construction Management and Productivity

Over the past twenty years, civil engineering business has seen decrease in productivity with more than 50% of projects either over budgeted or running behind schedule. Further the construction industry becoming battle ground for legal settlements. Some of these issues are becoming major hurdles for facilitating timely delivery of projects within the estimated budgets. Primarily, project delivery consists of two major components; one is problem definition and the other, the exploring solutions & strategies to the identified and unanticipated problem. While defining the problem, always give emphasis to project requirements, constraints, their functional outcomes, availability of legitimate land and cost & availability of budget. Project management and Engineering Economics are important topics for PE exam; while addressing solutions, work out strategies that meet all of the project requirements. Currently, construction management practices are not investing enough time to understand and define the problems on project delivery structure and sometimes this may cause serious concern where the efforts of the entire technical project team go unrealized. Therefore, management team should wisely adhere to the practices that address the technical and social elements involved with construction projects. Utilizing people centered approach and project scheduling diagrams such as Activity On Node or Activity On Arrow Diagrams to maximize the effort for project completion within the estimated budget and expected time schedule. Activity durations and critical path methods are discussed in Principles of Engineering exam review course. The strategy of people centered innovation involves participation of all people in project decision making process that includes partnership at all levels that influence the project planning, implementation, execution and delivery process.