Cost, Productivity and Financial Control

There are substantial differences in the objective of a graduate education in construction compared to an undergraduate degree. A graduate from the latter is supposed to have acquired people and technical skills that allows him or her to be immediately productive to the employer. Compare that to what is expected from a Masters. You will be judged by your problem-solving capabilities and your ability to improve the company’s bottom line or the project’s productivity. In other words, you need to be able to see the big picture, and apply relatively global solutions. Performing menial management duties would take you nowhere.

All of the above leads into the fact that I will be a facilitator, letting you and your peers to conduct the sessions as much as possible. We will decide on a champion for each of the topics covered. That individual will read the assigned literature in detail (at least one book), and will make an introductory presentation of the topic. The rest of the class will have read the article or similar reading listed with the topic description in this syllabus. Hopefully, we will sustain a dialogue about the topic for the whole period. Each of the areas covered in this course is huge in itself, and one of the main challenges for all of us will be summarizing these topics in a way that all of us know them in reasonable detail, without bogging the meetings with so much detail that the big picture is lost.