What is the difference between engineering project management and project management?

Answer 1

Take "Project management." First, there has to be a Project. That generally involves all of the disciplines that will be necessary to do market wants and needs and competition assessment, available plant/organizational resources, available facilities (space, power, laboratory, computer, etc), available manpower in the various disciplines that will be needed to implement any Project concept, and so on. Typically, no "Project Management" people will be involved in the decision to commit to a Project, and the definition of its specifications, time, manpower, available resources and funding. Typically in making these decisions and allocations, one or more key engineers and other disciplines who will be involved in the physical implementation of the process will have been involved in the decision process. At some point, not point exactly but rather time frame, key leaders will be assigned for the technical and implementation areas, and a Project Manager will be specified to essentially coordinate the way in which these groups communicate and are given and use resources. Any actual time and results schedules and/or benchmarks are normally formed by the PM after coercing the elements that form an overall schedule from the individual discipline leaders. This involves a great deal of communication skill and organizational understanding and correlation. The PM doesn't have much actual power, that resides in the person or persons who made the final decision to do the project and the PM can only exercise influence on them. This again involves considerable communication and presentation skill, and psychology, but not actual power. Not a lot of actual engineering or technical skill is required by the PM, but it essential he understand the overall objectives and resources, and can understand the significance of the team making or not making the various benchmarks.

Now take Engineering Management. In many ways, each of the technical discipline Managers function much like the PM, only in their specific disciplines. That is, they pick their staff from those top management makes available, assign the key staff responsibilities for key results necessary to accomplish their part of the team effort, allocate their resources according their best judgment, and work out time schedules with benchmarks that will result in their overall part of the project being accomplished. After that, they really leave their engineers and technical people alone to do their job, subject to meeting benchmarks. EMs do have real power, they can remove or advance their key people. But, they rarely do real engineering in the sense of doing the math/physics/programming/research/experi… etc themselves. Even more rarely do they have the skill to do so very well.