Seminar - Anthony Vlasic - Integrating Soft Issues into a Life-Cycle Project Management Model

Thursday, June 17, 1999, 10 - 11 am
Civil Engineering Lecture Room 1

Abstract

This seminar will summarise the major parts of the PhD for Anthony Vlasic.

The aim of this project is to develop a model for the integration of soft issues into a life-cycle project management system. Soft issues refer to items such as functionality, operability, environment, community, safety and quality. They are known as soft issues because they are difficult to quantify but are critical to a projects success. For example; how would you go about considering community values when developing a major infrastructure project. An Environmental Impact Study is only one of the steps.

A life-cycle project management system incorporating these soft issues, known as Integrated Facility Engineering (IFE), is being developed by the Project Management Group, in this department. Some features of the system include the single phased structure of the development process, integration of the project teams, and definition of the project objectives into life-cycle objective functions.

With this in mind, some of the questions that will be answered in this talk include:

Why are soft issues significant to projects?
What are the present techniques used to model these issues?
What are the limitations of present techniques?
How will IFE help to improve the planning process?
What are the aims and objectives of the project?
How far has the research progressed and what is the next step?

So stay tuned if you want to understand the mechanics of projects in a different light.