Hello, everyone. Today we will be talking about what is a project and the project development cycle, or what I refer to as the traditional project delivery method for our construction projects. Before we talk about, or if we want to understand what is a project, we want to understand about what are the characteristics of any project. In the literature, there is a lot of characteristics that are there. I will highlight in the module today, these are the main four characteristics of any construction projects you find. One, objective, each construction project has to have a specific objective for the project, which may be a unique or one of a kind to be completed. And it has to be completed within a certain specifications and the plans which we will discuss In the coming few slides. For example, if we want to build a bridge, the main objective in this case is to connect let's say between two sides of a river. If we want, for example, we live here in Manhattan and we want to connect between Manhattan and New Jersey, we have several options. One of them is tunnel or a bridge. The objective of that is to connect them together, these two sides because of the demand for the commute between the two region. Another main project characteristic is time. You cannot just have an unlimited time to build a project. Sometimes you start with a specific time and then start to increase more and more. That's okay, but you have to start first and define what's the start date in the construction and what's the end dates of the construction. And the client needs to specify that time duration. Budget, you have to have funding limits on our project. This fund can come from the public sector or the private sector, or sometimes actually it's a combination between both. And this specific item, budget, is actually a major problem we are facing in our industry today. We do have limited budget, especially when it comes to building infrastructure projects for cities and countries, which is a topic very important that we will be covering later in another course within this specialization. Last but not least, resources, each project has to consume resources. And I want to dig deeper in this topic, to better understand the importance of utilizing resources because our construction industry is resource-driven industry. So there are four main type of resources in our industry, the capital, the cash, money, the construction materials, the labors or the manpower, and the construction equipments or machines. Sometimes we refer to these construction resources as the four Ms of the construction resources industry which is money, materials, manpower, and machines. It is very important as a construction manager to utilize these four main construction resources in a way to accomplish the targets or three major targets for any construction project you will be involved in. Which are, one, to finish the project within the budget allocated to you for the project. Second is to finish the project within the schedule agreed on at the contract with the owner or the client. Last is to finish it within the quality targets approved or agreed on in the beginning of that project. So these are the main three objectives on any project that you want to accomplish. However, you can see these objectives in many textbook out there, in a lot of articles. But in fact, in reality, in addition to these three you have a lot of other objectives. As a CM and PM for the project, as engineer, as an owner for a company, you have to follow a lot of other objectives. For example, I'm highlighting here a couple of them only. You want to finish your project with a zero accident, for the labors and for outside the project, for the nearby public next to the project. That's why the area of safety as a construction manager, you have to understand it very carefully. And we dedicate an entire module for this course on environment health and safety for CM. Speaking of environment, environmental targets, you have to make sure that you will meet these targets that you agreed on that are related to the environment in a way or another. That's why also in addition to the EH and S, Environment, Health, and Safety module, we have, we cover also another module for you as a CM to understand which is focused on sustainability. Other objectives, for example, financial success that you need to make sure as CM that you are making some profit for the company. And which would also doing a good job will improve your reputation to keep getting more jobs in the industry. With all these examples of main objectives, of utilizing these four major resources of construction to accomplish these objectives, you have to have in mind that you're always doing all that under the good customer relations. The nature of our industry depends a lot on repetitive work by sometimes the same client. If you do a good job, you accomplish all these major objectives, especially targets that been assigned at the contract by the client, that by itself can be a door to open many other jobs for the coming future. So as a construction manager with all these objectives, you have to have the role of wearing kind of different hats along the cycle of the project from inception to the end, especially as a CM when you start construction phase of the project, you start building it. And all the different hats and all the roles and the tasks as a CM that you want to accomplish, you want to accomplish it based on using the right resources to finalize the right targets of these objectives. And the role of a construction manager, we have a totally different module to dig deeper into this area in this course.
