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Project management is quite different from engineering. An engineer is normally responsible only for his or her own work product and generally deals with the reactions of inanimate substances that follow the laws of physics. A project manager is required to be responsible for the quantity, quality, and timeliness of work products that generally do not follow any physical laws. To succeed as a project manager, the most important thing is to ensure good communication within the project team. Communication can be accomplished in many forms (verbal, written, formal, and informal), but one size does not fit all, and the project manager is responsible for communications concerning the project and its execution. The communicator, not the listener, is responsible for ensuring that the message has been received and understood. It is also important to understand that the final cost of a project is affected more by its design than by its execution. The decisions made in developing a concept have a much greater impact on cost than those made later on, as indicated inFigure 1.1. Figure 1.1--Ability to influence project costs vs. project life cycle. For our purposes, a project is defined as the group of tasks necessary to reach a given goal in the required timeframe. The project manager is the person responsible for getting those tasks accomplished and achieving that goal.
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