Project management is the art and science of mobilizing and managing people, materials, equipment and money to complete the assigned project work on time within budgeted costs and specified technical performance standards. It aims at achieving the specified objectives efficiently and effectively by managing human energies and optimizing the non-human resources placed at their disposal.


Construction projects differ from other on-going steady state business enterprises like construction manufacturing and trading in many ways. The salient distinguishing features of project management and its organizational implications are as follows:

1.   The project mission is unique. No two projects are alike. The type of work at each site differs, unlike in industry where a factory manufactures the same type of product repeatedly.

2.     Projects are transient in nature. Unlike on-going steady state enterprises, a project comes to an end after its mission is fulfilled.

3.  Projects consist of a variety of specialized works and need a wide range of tradesmen, who are casual employees. Since projects have a short life, workers move from job to job like nomads, whereas the stable industrial enterprises have more or less permanent employees.

4.     Project sites are in open remote areas and are prone to weather changes, whereas industrial setups are housed in a permanent accommodation.

5.    Project works are carried out at places that are far away from the corporate head offices, unlike the industrial management, which is generally located at the place of work.

6.  Project work, specially in high rise buildings, involves operations at heights, making the accident rate higher than in industrial factories.

7.   Construction projects operate under risk and uncertain conditions as compared to well-defined industrial processes.

8.   The predetermined and specified start and completion dates of projects do not leave any time flexibility, specially when projects are to be executed speedily under relatively risk prone complex situations and resource constraints.

9. Project time and costs are correlated. Time delays in-between the project execution can alter the schedule of subsequent activities. Schedule slippages affect the project economy. Project delays attract heavy penalties. Cost on account of time delays, unless properly controlled, can increase exponentially instead of marginally as in case of other on-going enterprises.

10.Quality at each stage of project work is inspected. Construction quality judgement lies with the inspector of works, rather than the measurement of tolerances of an industrial product. Further acceptance of any work does not absolve the builder of defects appearing later on. In such situations generally the entire completed affected work gets rejected, whereas with the one product rejection in the manufacturing process.

11.Project tasks are generally non-routine. They are to be executed speedily. This hardly leaves any time for training or learning process. Accordingly projects employ experienced staff with proven skills. Comparatively, it is difficult to get state of the art experienced project operations and management personnel than the on-going enterprises.

12. Since projects are generally handled by various companies they result in social, organizational, technical and economic interactions. Unlike in on-going concerns, any adverse effects in one project can have its repercussions on other interdependent projects.

13. Most project by nature contain several interrelated sub-systems. Integration of activities of several sub-systems requires coordination and needs information for making decisions. Information extraction for making decisions at various levels of management is relatively complex under dynamic complex project environments rather than in on-going stable enterprises.