Project Scheduling Handbook “Civil and Environmental Engineering” 1st Edition by Jonathan F. Hutching.
Project sheduling and production management is one of the most profitable careers within the modern American construction industry. Although lenders, owners, contractors, developers, project teams, inspectors, designers, engineers, suppliers, and a host of others all play integral parts in the construction process, the project scheduler is instrumental in making the production schedule either profitable or a financial disaster. As a licensed and certified construction management professional for two decades now, I see this business from the inside out. Because the construction industry is so competitive, one must be both aggressive and smart to be successful.
This book/software package is unique in that it addresses the professional techniques of project scheduling as never before. The software included in the book contains the essential sorts (summary reports) of a CPM network schedule, which are integrated to provide a working network schedule incorporating program logic. You enter the data, the computer does the work. Use of this type of software program, and repeated exposure to this book, will make the reader more efficient and more marketable in professional project scheduling. The skills learned from this book can be applied by any project scheduler of production-type project execution.
In today’s fiercely competitive business world, there is no room for mediocrity. Being experienced and able to do the job just aren’t enough anymore. Costs of materials and labor must be bid tight, and there’s not much margin there to work with. So time, is the only factor left to manipulate for producing profit. Accordingly, today’s profits in construction projects are being made by superior modern systems of project scheduling. Even the best project planning and management cannot overcome the lack of a skillful vii project scheduler. In modern residential, commercial, industrial, and public works construction, it is the project scheduler who is pivotal in bringing the project into existence, on time and on budget.
The construction industry has changed dramatically in the last decades from companies that once dominated their markets by size, bidding, and bonding power to the modern, lean, downsized companies of today that use strategic personnel in definitive career positions for operations management, and contract out all the field work to licensed subcontractors. In the trades, these contractors are called paper contractors, because all they handle is paper. We also call them smart. No tools, no trucks, no employees. Their success formula is simple: tight bid + lower overhead = they get the job. They make the profit through fast-track production running CPM scheduling. These types of paper contractor companies are currently enjoying a large growth in the construction industry because of their efficiency in construction project execution.
I have earned my living in the construction industry from apprentice to journeyman to foreman to contractor, and I have seen many changes that foreshadow even bigger changes in the years to come as we accelerate toward the future. Of all the materials we build with today, 75% have been invented within the last 50 years. Of those, 80% were invented in the last 10 years. It is estimated that, of all the things we will be building with by the year 2025, 90% haven’t even been invented yet. Graphite composite plastics that are stronger than steel, air-entrained lightweight concrete, and ultralight metal alloys are all space-age technology being used in modern construction today—and even as you read this, the clock on their obsolescence is ticking. Paradigm is a word that means the currently accepted parameters of any specific thing, such as an industry. The construction industry’s paradigm is changing as fast as the clouds above your head. More important, as Alvin Toffler so correctly stated in his prescient book, Future Shock, the rate of that change is accelerating exponentially.
Worldwide, in residential construction, American Platform Framing is the accepted standard of excellence in homebuilding. After serving as an estimator and consultant for the insurance industry’s reconstruction efforts after both the 7.6 Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, and the 7.8 Northridge– Los Angeles earthquake of 1993, and having witnessed the devastation firsthand, I now understand why the rest of the world sends their building officials and industry representatives to the United States to learn our methods of construction.
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