Preface
The purpose of this book is two-fold:
1. To serve the needs of students of our course ‘Open Design and Construction Management: an Operations Research approach’ at Delft University of Technology.
2. To make practitioners familiar with an approach towards project management which is different from but complementary to the current main stream of literature on the subject.
Students have always been a major stimulus for me and have shaped my view that the best of them are essential for the acceptance of any new concepts in practice. Not immediately after their graduation, but after the years they need to acquire the power in their organization to overcome the inevitable fear of innovation.
Practitioners with an open mind to new ideas tend to wrestle with the issue of finding the time to explore those ideas and incorporate them in their daily work. For this reason, we have tried to be concise rather than exhaustive.
Mathematical modeling can be useful for the implementation of best management practices. In regard to project management in particular: network planning and multi-criteria decision making (Chapters 4 and 5). Any feedback from readers on the use of these tools will be highly appreciated.
There are several roads that lead to Rome. Likewise, there are several ways to manage a project. The stakeholder-oriented approach described here deserves to be at least taken into consideration as an alternative to the prevailing control-oriented practice.
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