ENGINEERING PROCESS

Engineering Process

Engineering Process

Introduction

Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) is a project management tool that was introduced and developed by the Navy in the 1950s to analyze and control the large number of activities involved in complex projects. It is a powerful tool that lays out all tasks involved in the project in a graphic form. It helps the project manager identify the critical activities that need to be closely monitored if the project is to be completed on time. PERT also identifies what activities are noncritical, namely activities that could be delayed without affecting the completion time of the entire project (Turner, 2006). Software tools available for project management include Microsoft Project and PERT Chart Expert.

Engineering Project Management Approach and its Phases

Project work is essentially teamwork, and the past few years have seen an increasing interest in people aspects of project work. The fact that projects and temporary organizations are just that—temporary—has effects on how people behave and on how they view the work being done. And most of the time, the task to be fulfilled is clear not only to people involved but also to the general public. PM has a more transparent situation when it comes to the way to manage as compared to any general organization (Pinto, 2007).

The same is also true for members of the team. The task is clear for the members of the team, as well as for their environments. The result seems to be that people working in projects are highly motivated in doing what they are doing and very focused in their work (Midler, 2005). One aspect of this is that highly efficient project people might get stuck in the so-called honey trap, presumably where project work, by virtue of its selfreinforcing nature, leads to stress and burnout reactions. Problems with people working in projects and problems of people are matters of ongoing investigations into the nature of PM. Most certainly there are also other PM problems of an engineering type to be solved—for instance scheduling—but practitioners and researchers alike seem to agree that people problems are likely to be of major concern for the future (Kreiner, 2005).

Also there seems to be agreement concerning the need to sort out efficiency and effectiveness notions in a project context. Traditionally, a project that does not fulfill the task assigned with the resources at hand and on time has been regarded as a project failure. However, there are several examples of successes when projects are not ready on time and that are characterized by serious overspending (Ekstedt, 2005). One well-known example is the Sydney Opera House. On the other hand, certain types of projects are almost never considered to be successful. One group of such projects is IT projects, with failure rates close to 100%.

Exploring connections between the development of PM as a professional field and organizational theory certainly will be one of the concerns in the future because professionals often ask what can be learned from organizational theorists (Lientz, ...