Management of Engineering Projects

This chapter begins with an explanation of the alternative forms of organisation, and their appropriateness for the management of different kinds of project. This is followed by looking at some of the problems arising in project management. The next part of this section examines the skills and attributes required in project managers. The final section looks at aspects of the project management process —that is, achieving the project objectives of cost, time and budget through other people. The Bibliography contains details of further reading that covers project management in more detail. The functions of the project manager and project leader were defined in Chapter 1, section 1.1, this chapter assumes that both these roles will be taken by a single project manager; indeed for a small project these and other roles will be taken by the project engineer. A further definition that is needed for this chapter is the Line Manager : the person who is responsible for a particular function within a company. The line manager usually has no project responsibilities, and a project manager will request functions to be performed by the line manager’s department or section. Functional Manager or Departmental Manager are synonymous with Line Manager.