A multidiciplinary forum for PROJECT MANAGEMENT

The 'big four' engineering Institutions (Chemical, Civil, Electrical, and Mechanical), together with a number of related organisations, have all rightly claimed that they are involved in and in some instances lead projects with a major technical content. Thus, project management is carried out across a broad spectrum of industrial and commercial activities.

In brief, the essence of the function of project management is to achieve the targets assigned to that trinity of key elements:

COST TIME QUALITY

Even these can be distilled into the ultimate goal of maximising the balance between cash flow and profitability.

In any complex engineering task, it is a truism that pressure towards improving any one of cost, time or quality will impair the out-turn of the other two. Hence, to impose a crash programme, thereby shortening the originally planned time-scale, will inevitably cost more than first predicted and there will be a risk of lowering quality of the output. Figure 1 shows the ideal or optimum target for the project manager, while Figure 2 illustrates that a move of the intersection 0 towards one of the apexes of the triangle strains the other connections and distorts the figure the optimum is central to the figure and central to the project manager's work.

It is these basic concepts and their more extensive implications which underline the universality and multidisciplinary nature of project management. These features were recognised eleven years ago with the welcome but not well publicised establishment of an inter-institutional committee, known as the Engineering Project Management Forum (EPMF).

The proposal to establish the Forum was originally made during a meeting at the National Economic Development Office (NEDO), formerly part of HM Treasury. The mission statement adopted by the EPMF was to 'develop and promote the practice of Professional Project Management of all engineering disciplines, so as to enable and enhance the application and excellence of engineering skills'. Within this context is set EPMF's definition of project management, which is:

'The planning, monitoring and control of all aspects of a project and the motivation of all those involved in it to achieve the project objectives on time and to the specified cost, quality and performance.'

The EPMF exists to:

* provide a forum for the exchange of experience and knowledge;

* coordinate the learned society activities of the member organisations in the field of project management;

* promote and develop the standards of competence expected from project managers;

* offer advice on policy relevant to project management in industry and all the professions.

Typical meeting topics have been:

* win-win project management;

* meeting the needs of clients;

* the role of project management in delivering business success;

* developing projects on contaminated land;

* joint funding for infrastructure projects;

* winning international projects the challenge for industry and government;

* the benefits of engineering project management to the UK economy.

The concept of the Forum is excellent but the EPMF itself is not well-known. It is now about time that it adopts a much higher profile with an impact which spreads throughout the ranks of the engineering professions.