Building Trends Focus of Workshop

Building Trends Focus of Workshop

RICE NEWS OFFICE
Sept. 17, 1998

A comprehensive look at the trends and issues shaping the engineering and construction
industry will be the topic of a Rice workshop that draws together resources from
Rice’s business and civil engineering faculty.

The Sept. 28 workshop is aimed at project directors and senior managers of large
engineering and construction companies, such as Brown & Root Inc.; Fluor Daniel
Inc.; Bechtel; Schlumberger; and energy companies such as Enron. A fee is required
to attend the one-day event, which will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. in
the Kyle Morrow Room of Fondren Library.

The workshop is sponsored by the Department of Civil Engineering of the George
R. Brown School of Engineering, the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management,
the Construction Industry Institute and the Project Management Institute.

The future of engineering and construction is changing, said Ahmad Durrani, chairman
and professor of civil engineering at Rice. For large engineering and construction
firms, the market is global. Typically, a project may be under construction in
one country and financed by a consortium of firms from different countries, while
teams of engineers around the world work on the project.

To survive, engineering and construction firms have to know how to position themselves
in respect to other international companies and how to gain advantages in a troubling
environment, such as Asia where a financial crisis is occurring, he said.

"One of the objectives of the workshop is to be able to assess your competitiveness
in the international market and be able to benchmark your capabilities and your
positioning vis à vis other international companies," Durrani said.

The workshop will consist of speakers, followed by a panel discussion covering
topics such as market changes in the engineering and construction industry, improving
project performance and benchmarking, and Japanese project management style.

Two keynote speakers will be Joseph Munisteri, president of the Houston-based
consulting firm Joseph G. Munisteri Co., and Richard Tucker, the C.T. Wells Professor
of Project Management at the University of Texas-Austin.

For more information contact the Department of Civil Engineering at (713) 527-4949.