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The construction
of a new building will have many elements (e.g. bricklaying, electrical
fit-out) that are heavily repetitive, even though the building they
are part of, is unique.
A
project should also have a defined start and finish time. Some of this
will be open-ended, but the important issue is that there is a constraint
on the time. Projects without an end-date unsurprisingly tend to run
on forever! Time is only one of categories of project goals. The others
are cost and resource. In common with many management areas there are
trade-offs to be made. In general, a task can be accomplished quickly,
cheaply or done well - not all three. It is vital that along with good
goals for time, those for cost and quality are also put in place.
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This
provides the main area where projects are different, and therefore require
to be managed differently. The other major aspect is that something has
changed through the project being carried out. This aspect of managing
change is the most significant part of project management. The change
may be to systems or to individuals, but managing this process of change
is a distinctly different activity from general management.
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