Construction Management JumpStart The Best First Step Toward a Career in Construction Management (3rd Edition) - Original PDF
نویسندگان: Barbara J. Jackson
خلاصه: Introduction Congratulations! You are about to embark on an adventure. This book is about the processes, the people, and the practices that we call construction management—a term and a profession that may be unfamiliar to many people. Construction, as most individuals understand it, is an activity or a series of activities that involves some craftspeople, building materials, tools, and equip- ment. But you will learn that there is a great deal more to it than that. If you think that construction is all about brawn and not much about brains, then you probably haven’t been paying very close attention to what has been going on in the built environment in the past several decades. Buildings today can be very complicated, and the building process has become extremely demanding. It takes savvy professional talent to orchestrate all of the means and methods needed to accomplish the building challenge. This book’s focus is not on construction per se. Its focus is on the construction process and those individuals who manage that process. Construction manage- ment involves the organization, coordination, and strategic effort applied to the construction activities and the numerous resources needed to achieve the building objective. Construction management combines both the art and science of building technology along with the essential principles of business, management, computer technology, and leadership. Construction management as a profession is a relatively new concept, which may explain why you have not heard of it before. Up until the 1960s, the management tasks associated with large construction projects were typically handled by civil engineers. But in 1965, faculty from nine universities gathered in Florida to form the Associated Schools of Construction. What started as a movement to upgrade the status of construction education at universities evolved into a standardized construction management curriculum leading to an exciting new career choice, one for which there was increasing demand. Men and women who love the idea of transforming a lifeless set of plans and specifications into something real—a single-family home, a high-rise office building, a biotech facility, a super highway, or a magnificent suspension bridge—had found an educational program that provided both the academic course work and the practical management tools needed to plan, organize, and coordinate the increas- ingly complex construction process. If you are one of the many individuals who desire the intellectual challenges of architecture, engineering, technology, and business, yet long to be outside in the thick of things, getting your hands dirty and ultimately producing a tangible result—something of lasting value—then construction management might just be the ticket for you