PM Network

In this, the final blog post for me in 2018, I’ll acquaint current and potential readers of PM Network^® with the magazine’s Edge section.

Edge contains a collection of quick-reading, newsy articles that will update you about interesting projects, trends and potential opportunities. In December’s PM Network, the section begins with a heartwarming profile of a water park in Texas, USA that was built so everyone, including those with disabilities, can enjoy the facility. The team behind the water park tweaked the design based on stakeholder feedback.

Next is a brief article that testifies to the power of disruptive technology. The article reports that Dubai is now requiring 25 percent of new buildings must be 3D printed within the next seven years. The reasoning behind the mandate is to reduce human construction labor by 70 percent in a place where heat makes it difficult, and to cut building material cost by up to 90 percent.

Digital transformation is part of the next story, as well. Oil companies will use technology to help them profit from drilling small or very remote wells.

Next story…same story. Restaurants are using more and more robots to not just serve food but cook and prepare it as well. Robots are ideal for repetitive tasks—a recent analysis pinned 73 percent of food service and accommodation industry workers now perform could be automated.

Flipping the page, the Edge reader learns that despite a recent collapse of a prefabricated overpass that made big headlines, the modular building method is still quite popular in the construction industry.

Edge then focuses on a growing area of the economy (and result of a growing economy), the increasing challenge of properly disposing electrical and electronic waste. Projects are bringing electronics recycling plants to several parts of the world as a means to solve this challenge.

New York City certainly has a growing economy. It also has a subway system in massive disrepair. Projects to overhaul the system are being planned, but funding has not been found.

In between these two final Edge items is a short report about the perils of failed IT integration. This was pinned as the cause of suspected money laundering at a branch of Danske Bank A/S. The branch relied on its own IT platform rather than using the bank’s IT platform, resulting in questionable transactions not being flagged.

As you can see, Edge covers a world of interesting projects and project-related news. We invite you to follow Edge (and the rest of the content of PM Network) in the new year. Look for our annual Jobs Report in January!

I don’t know about you, but I’m not a big fan of cold weather, especially in April. If you live in the northern part of the United States, chances are that as I am writing this, you’ve experienced snow in the last few days. Yes, in April.

There are some parts of the world where cold is an everyday reality. A project that took place in such cold is the cover story of this month’s PM Network^®. The Arctic region is one of increasing economic importance, as oil and gas development start to ramp up. The only way to get supplies to the Canadian Arctic port of Tuktoyaktuk (aside from flying) was via an ice road only open four months per year.

The Canadian government has had a permanent road in mind for 50 years. Recently, the 137-kilometer road linking the Arctic with Inuvik, Northwest Territories, was completed. Challenges for the project team were many: equipment had to run 24 hours a day because of the cold; the road had to be built without destroying the natural landscape that is the cultural heritage of indigenous communities; the impact on wildlife had to be taken into account; and the road couldn’t damage the permafrost, lest it become a boggy mess each spring. Early thaws of the permafrost forced the project team to cut eight weeks from the four-year project timeline.

The project should reduce the cost of living for Tuktoyaktuk residents and save the government the annual cost of building and maintaining a winter road. The government will monitor environmental impacts to help it optimize future infrastructure projects in the Arctic.

Have you been involved in projects taking place in extreme climates? Please let us know in the comments.

When you are building into the sky where no building has gone before, you have to be creative with planning and problem-solving. Super-tall buildings are all the rage now, with the kilometer height milestone set to be broken in Saudi Arabia in 2022. The first mile-high tower is being proposed for Tokyo, Japan.

June PM Network puts you in the project manager’s hot seat, showing you the challenges you might face erecting these Herculean structures. The key risks to mitigate are logistics (moving so much material in and out on schedule), worker safety and the effects of wind.

Are projects in your industry pushing the envelope? How, as project managers, do you deal with that? Please discuss in the comment section below.

To the reader who wrote me that PM Network should have less on construction projects and more on IT/technology projects, we offer this compromise: An April cover story on cutting-edge technology taking hold in the world of building buildings. According to the story, 3-D building information modeling (BIM) is a prized tool for a new generation of construction project managers who use it to improve communication and reduce risks. The next step for many forwarding-looking firms is moving to 4-D BIM—incorporating schedule data, and then all the way to 5-D, which includes cost data.

Other innovative construction tools include using drones and GIS to speed surveying and make it more accurate; taking advantage of Internet of Things technology to track performance data for equipment and materials; and employing self-healing concrete, nanometals, preassembled modules and 3-D printing to cut costs and increase quality.

Shifting gears to the technology behind PM Network magazine, please use the comments to tell us how you prefer to read PM Network and why: In print? Via our digipub on a laptop? Digipub on tablet? On mobile phone? Or do you fancy our PM Network app on your mobile phone or tablet? Thanks for sharing your preference!