Effective Management in Construction Industry Essay

Effective Management in Construction Industry - Essay Example These materials are useful even to construction managers with general knowledge on management. This essay is geared towards putting together the essential components as far as construction manager's roles are concerned in ensuring the timeliness of a specific project. It tries to emphasize the traditional yet crucial management functions such as planning, organizing, staffing, budgeting, and coordinating and its contribution to the completion of the project within deadlines set. This also provides inputs or synthesis of studies related to construction industry that is contributory to improving implementation efficiency and completed projects' quality. Let us consider a project and its management in the general context in order to understand the process. Project management in the universal context is defined by most literatures as a process by which an idea or project is created, processed, and accepted, and from which resources, whether materials, financial and manpower, are allocated, directed, and carefully coordinated to achieve the goals with the optimum quality, cost, and timeliness (Hendrickson 1998, Jones 2003, FTA 2006:1-9). Based on the definition of the Federal Transit Administration, a project is "made up of a group of interrelated work activities constrained by a specific scope, budget, and schedule to deliver capital assets needed to achieve the strategic goals of an Agency" (2006: 1-3) or a corporate organization for that matter. These aspects hold specifically true for construction projects, over-all goals of which revolve around the idea of delivering the project on time, with quality, and ensuring optimum benefits to the company and the owner. The interrelated tasks inherent in a project, in most cases, require specialized workers to handle and deal with. The efficiency of the management teams in handling the works within a project dictates the pace by which it is done and is among the most crucial in completing the project within the time frame. Besides, it is the management that closely deals with the owner, users or sponsor of a construction project and "it will be wise for any owner to have a clear understanding of the acquisition process in order to maintain firm control of the quality, timeliness and cost of the completed facility."(Hendrickson 1998) There are a lot of approaches to project management that a project manager can use depending on the type of work to be done. Individual projects may vary in their scope of work and life cycle. Recent innovative approaches to project management as far as construction industry is concerned are a subject of many researches and studies in the field. These studies and recommendations from researches can be applied in the actual management of the project. FTA (2006:1-9) states that the project management process begins with identification of the user requirement, project constraints, resource needs, and establishment of realistic objectives to meet the strategic goals. The common life cycle is presented in Figure 1. It usually starts with user demand and ends up to the structures intended usable life. Figure 1 The Project Life Cycle of a Constructed Facility (Hendrickson 1998) The primary concern of the construction manager is