
Explore the foundations of construction project management, from target audiences and owner, designer, and contractor perspectives to course intensity, scope, and the absence of software training.
Define what a project is in construction project management: a temporary, unique effort with a defined beginning, end, scope, resources, and related programs or portfolios.
Explore how the construction industry drives global growth, classify projects into residential, non-residential, heavy, and industrial types, and review covid-19 resilience and the 2020-2030 outlook.
Explore the five project management process groups and ten knowledge areas guiding construction projects, with 49 processes, from initiating to closing and their integration.
Introduce the initiating process group by creating a project charter that formally authorizes the project, empowers the manager, and identifies key stakeholders for effective planning.
Explore executing and monitoring and control in construction projects, linking integration, resources, quality, communications, procurement, risk response, and closing activities, including punch lists and final payments.
Outline of project participants—owner, design professionals, construction professionals, and the project manager—covering responsibilities in defining scope and budget, preparing documents, and coordinating procurement across project delivery systems.
Navigate the construction project life cycle from concept to design, construct, commissioning, and hand over, then operation, while highlighting feasibility studies, cost estimates, master schedules, value engineering, and contract strategy.
Explore project strategy, procurement, contracts, delivery systems, planning, scheduling, resource management, bidding, cost estimating, risk, monitoring, quality, safety, and a case study in construction project management.
Explore how project strategy guides design-construction interaction, procurement method, contract type, and delivery system to maximize the probability of achieving project objectives and minimize owner risk.
Explore design/construction interaction schemes—separate, phased, and fast track—highlighting how overlapping design and construction saves time, with bidding, delivery systems, and procurement discussed.
Explore what a contract is, its elements and documents, the types of contracts used in construction, and contract clauses, including offer and acceptance, mutual intent, consideration, capacity, and lawful purpose.
Explore competitive bidding contracts, including lump-sum and unit-price options, and compare price-based versus cost-based arrangements in construction project management.
Contrast contract types from lump sum and unit price to cost-plus variants, analyzing owner and contractor risk distribution for each, including guaranteed maximum price and sliding fee.
Explore how project delivery systems and contract types allocate risks to capable parties, reducing uncertainty. Learn systems like design build, construction manager at work, and construction manager agency.
Design bid build and design negotiate build use two contracts—designer and general contractor—where design is completed before construction, with selection by invitation, negotiation, or competitive open bidding.
Examine design-build, design-manage-build, and owner-builder delivery systems, focusing on single contracts, design-construction overlap, fast-tracking, and negotiation-driven risk among owner, engineer-contractor, and contractors.
Examine the construction manager agency and construction manager at risk project delivery systems, where owners contract designers and a construction manager who coordinates costs, schedules, and subcontractors, with distinct liability.
Explore integrated project delivery with a multi-party contract that evenly distributes risks to improve cost, duration, and quality, and compare turnkey and PPP models.
Learn how to create a hierarchical work breakdown structure that divides a project into deliverables, work packages, activities, and tasks, from both owner and contractor perspectives.
Understand activity coding in the work breakdown structure using alphanumeric codes for project, area, work type, and cost. Compare CSI unit and master formats and their divisions for estimating.
This lecture explains the work breakdown structure and its break down limit, detailing how naming activities and balancing detail improve scheduling and control.
Develop and assign project resources by detailing the organization breakdown structure and a ram using raci roles, linking wbs to obs, with control accounts and clear communication paths.
Identify and define logical relationships among project activities by determining predecessors and successors, avoiding loops and redundancy, while considering resource constraints to plan concurrent and sequential work on site.
Identify the main types of relationships in construction scheduling: finish to start, finish to finish, start to start, and start to finish; discuss lead, lag, and negative and positive lag.
Learn to draw activity-on-arrow networks, including virtual start and end, and identify predecessors and successors. Also handle independent, merge, burst, and cross relationships, and use dummy activities to observe logic.
Explore the activity on node network, where activities are nodes and relationships are arrows, using finish-to-start links, sequence steps, and virtual start/end to compare with the activity-on-arrow approach.
Estimate the activity duration to enable project scheduling, using quantity, production rate, number of crews, and the productivity factor; apply the duration formula to predict work days.
Learn to perform the critical path method using activity-on-arrow networks, calculating early and late event times, determining start/finish times, total and free floats, and identifying the project’s critical path.
Explore CPM with activity-on-node networks, detailing forward and backward path calculations, early/late start and finish, and how total and free floats identify the critical path for project duration.
Link CPM to bar charts by plotting activities from early and late start and finish times, showing early and late schedules and floats for resource leveling and cash flow control.
Identify the four m's: manpower, machinery, materials, and money, plus space and time as essential project resources. Plan and optimize these resources to achieve time, cost, and quality objectives.
Explore how manpower and machinery resources are managed to maximize productivity and minimize costs, covering selection, availability checks, crew formation, resource estimation, aggregation, and distribution from the contractor’s perspective.
Identify required labor skills and equipment, form crews for each work item, and allocate numbers based on size, duration, and site conditions; integrate labor and equipment for resource estimation.
Aggregate resources by summing daily requirements across activities using the project bar chart and resource profile histogram, aligning with CPM schedules to plan daily or weekly resource availability on site.
Learn resource leveling: smoothing a project’s resource usage with fixed duration by shifting non-critical activities within their floats. Assess improvements visually or via max measure, and prepare for resource allocation.
Learn how the central materials department coordinates procurement and vendor contracts across head office, regional offices, and branches, with emphasis on inventory control and codification.
Apply just-in-time and inventory buffer theories to determine lead time for materials, using historical processing and delivery data to estimate costs, penalties, and timing.
Maximize productivity and meet project milestones by ensuring on-time material availability. Improve inventory and supplier management to reduce costs, wastage, theft, and delays.
Differentiate site management from site space management and emphasize optimizing site layout to boost safety, productivity, and smooth workflow through understand, analyze, and solve phases and modelling techniques.
Analyze proper space management on a construction site to improve productivity, safety, and efficiency by correctly locating materials, equipment, and temporary facilities within crane radius and work flow.
Identify essential site needs and components to support safe, productive construction. Plan for site safety, site security, site information system, accessibility, and materials handling with clear maps, policies, and utilities.
Explore the site objects typology in construction project management, covering temporary facilities, equipment, storage and workspace areas, and permanent facilities. Learn how modeling, mobility, and space allocation shape their placement.
Evaluate CYC site objects boundary modeling approaches to place each object without overlap. Compare dimensionless, approximate geometry, and actual shape approaches with predetermined location, grid system, and continuous space concepts.
The phased approach optimizes site layouts by phase, using phase-specific partial layouts and schedules based on objects required, while limiting space reuse and fixing some locations across phases.
Compare static, phased, and dynamic site layout modeling approaches. The dynamic approach minimizes concurrent objects and total travel distance, delivering the greatest efficiency.
Define goals, translate them into measurable objectives, and apply constraints to optimize site space layout, including grid and phased approaches, boundary modeling, and penalties for relocation.
Explore site space layout modelling and optimization techniques for construction project management, including genetic algorithm, linear programming, and geometric reasoning used to optimize layouts and space management.
Define bidding as submitting a proposal to undertake a project and convert data into a cost estimate and a price, highlighting contractor and owner perspectives.
Break down bid price components in construction, detailing direct costs and site and general overheads, then explain markup, add-ons, contingency, risk, and profit, plus bidder variation.
Explore the contractor's bidding process from the primary decision to bid through bid preparation and submission, including cost estimation and obtaining bid documents.
Plan and schedule the estimate, study bid documents, perform quantity take-offs, notify subcontractors and vendors, prepare the method statement, and calculate direct costs and site overheads for bidding.
Compare historical costs of similar projects to estimate an early budget, and adjust with RSMeans, square-foot costs, and assemblies data for time, location, size, design, and soil conditions.
Explore conceptual cost estimating methods used at the concept phase to gauge economic feasibility, using unit, space, and volume approaches with size, location, and time adjustment factors.
Apply preliminary cost estimating during design to provide a more accurate project cost. Use bay, assembly, and elemental methods with RS Means data for bid benchmarking and value engineering.
Explore the detailed cost estimating method within the design bid build framework, quantifying quantities, resources, and productivity to forecast direct costs, site overheads, bid price, cash flow, and change orders.
Learn to compute the all-in equipment rate for temporary equipment by considering rental or ownership costs, depreciation, operating costs, and hours, while distinguishing permanent equipment as materials.
Classify materials as consumable or non consumable and calculate direct costs from vendor prices and quantities. Allocate non consumables to site overhead or concrete work where applicable.
this lecture defines direct costs and the unit rate method, deriving unit and total labor, equipment, and material costs from production rates for continuous work items.
Explore the operational estimating method for costs with idle times, compare it to unit rate estimates, and apply it to labour and equipment costs using the project schedule.
Forecast project cash flow by predicting monthly expenses and income across time intervals. Identify funding sources, maximum credit needs, project progress indicators, and markup decisions for cost control and bidding.
Explain project cash flow by detailing the expenses profile and income profile, including direct and indirect costs, overheads, and how discrete owner progress payments shape the S-curve.
Understand how contract provisions in construction project management shape cash flow forecasting, including progress payments, payment periods, retainers, advance payments, and their impact on bill of quantities and pay items.
Explore methods to minimize negative cash flow in construction projects, including subcontracting major items, delaying supplier payments, securing advance payments, and finance-based scheduling to reduce required credit and financing charges.
Learn how to build a period-by-period cash flow profile by classifying add ons into A, B, and C, forecasting expenses, income, and financing charges for construction projects.
Explore four scenarios of cash flow in construction project management, with and without financing charges or advance payments, using Excel to compute net cash flow, cumulative expenses, and project profit.
Evaluate financing charges in a construction bid by applying a 1.5% monthly interest on cumulative overdraft, with no advance payment, and compare final expenses and profit to the base scenario.
Develop cash flow forecasts by incorporating financing charges and markup into bid pricing, then adjust the net cash flow and determine the final price to meet the required profit.
Read the contract to understand when you will get paid and spend money, and how advances, progress payments, and financing options shape cash flow.
Apply the time value of money to construct cash flows, convert all amounts to present value, and assess feasibility using net present value and minimum attractive rate of return.
Define risk as an uncertain event that may affect time, cost, quality, and scope, creating threats or opportunities. Distinguish risks from issues and known unknowns and unknown unknowns in planning.
Analyze risks from qualitative to quantitative, focusing on high-severity risks to determine schedule and cost impacts, and apply probabilistic methods like sensitivity analysis and Monte Carlo to set contingencies.
Identify and allocate risks to the party best equipped to manage them, acknowledge owner's role, and align with project delivery system and contract type for cost-effective risk distribution.
Identify and analyze project risks, and apply risk responding strategies for threats and opportunities—avoid, transfer, mitigate, or accept (active or passive)—and escalate outside-scope risks.
Explore sensitivity analysis as a quantitative risk tool in construction project management, examining how input variations affect outputs like cost and schedule, using spider and tornado diagrams to gauge confidence.
Explore probabilistic scheduling with Pert analysis, using optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic durations to estimate mean project time and variance on the critical path, enabling probability calculations.
Apply Monte Carlo simulation analysis to generate multiple duration scenarios for project activities, using optimistic, most likely, and pessimistic estimates to assess project duration and confidence levels.
Understand how management reserve contingency is treated in bids, not in base estimates, and distributed as a lump sum for unidentified risks. It acts as a top-management safeguard, not profit.
Explore methods to measure the project percent completion, compare planned and actual progress, and apply weighted or equivalent units to determine overall project status for monitoring and control.
Apply earned value analysis to monitor time and cost, using budgeted cost of work scheduled, budgeted cost of work performed, and actual cost of work performed.
Update the project schedule at each cutoff date in parallel with earned value analysis to reflect actual time performance and forecast completion.
Projects in general, and construction projects particularly, goes through different stages from their inception to their closeout. In the simplest terms, a typical project starts as a “concept” which develops with time going through different phases such as designing, bidding, procuring, executing, controlling, and closing. Each of these phases without the application of a proper management can open a door for project failure. In fact, any construction project involves many stakeholders, resources, conflicting objectives, constraints, activities, deadlines, budget limit, risks, uncertainties, etc., which necessitates their proper management, planning, monitoring, and controlling. Thus, “construction project management” provides valuable processes, tools, and techniques to ensure a project success by meeting the project desired objectives.
In this course, you’ll be familiarized with essential details of how to successfully manage a construction project. The course follows the different project management “groups”, “knowledge areas”, and “processes” according to the PMBOK® Guide, however, from a “construction” project perspective. Despite that, a lot of the course contents are also applicable to “non-construction” projects. The course is designed to target those without any background of project management or construction project management. In other words, it starts from scratch. However, it can also be useful to those with project management background to either refresh their memory, or to address potentially missing concepts (i.e. depending on your needs). The course is divided into 14 sections that are briefly described as follows:
In “Section 1” you’ll be introduced to basic project management concepts such as the different project management groups, knowledge areas, and processes, as well as the different project stakeholders and project lifecycle stages. In “Section 2” the different project strategies which includes different contract types, elements, and clauses as well as different project delivery systems will be discussed in details. Followed by that, “Section 3” will describe the steps of project planning including how to develop a work breakdown structure, organization breakdown structure, and responsibility assignment matrix and how to define the logical relationships between the project’s activities and to graphically illustrate them. “Section 4” will be based on “Section 3” in which you’ll understand how to schedule your project using different scheduling techniques and how to determine the critical path and the project duration. In “Section 5” the major different project resources will be defined and their management processes will be discussed in details. This includes, labor management, equipment management, materials management, and site space management. To bid for a project, “Section 6” will go in details of the bidding process and explains how to develop a balanced bid and an unbalanced bid. To cost estimate your project before bidding, “Section 7” will discuss in details the estimating process and the different types of estimating methods that are applied at different project stages. In “Section 8”, the development and forecasting of a project cash flow and net cash flow profiles will be discussed in details. This will be accompanied with important practical considerations to increase the accuracy of the forecasting process. Construction risks are common, thus, in “Section 9” the detailed process of risk management including risk identification, analysis (qualitatively and quantitatively), allocating, responding, and monitoring and controlling will be discussed. Consequently, in “Section 10”, important aspects of project monitoring and controlling will be discussed. This includes measuring the work progress, earned value analysis, and schedule updating. In “Section 11”, an overview of the basic concepts of project crashing or acceleration and time-cost tradeoff will be discussed. Meeting the project’s quality requirement is a very important objective of project management, accordingly, in “Section 12” the process of quality management including quality planning, quality assurance, and quality control will be discussed. Executing a project without considering safety is a big failure to the construction firm, therefore, in “Section 13” the important elements of project safety management along with how to measure your company’s safety performance will be discussed. Finally, in “Section 14”, a real-life construction case study will be discussed to illustrate and learn how not applying or inadequately applying the principles of project management can lead to an unfortunate project failure.
All of these different topics are highly interrelated, correlated, and should be integrated to deliver a successful project, and this is what the course aims for. In other words, whenever we move from a topic to another, the link and connection between these topics will be emphasized. The topics to be covered will be accompanied with more than 60 carefully selected examples solved in details to ensure you understand the concept.
Finally, the course may be “lengthy” but “worthy”. Best wishes and good luck.