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The Channel Tunnel Project Management Essay

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A PROJECT ANALYSIS ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHANNEL TUNNEL

1.0 INTRODUCTION

The Channel Tunnel is one of Europe's biggest infrastructure projects ever. The 50.45km long tunnel has fulfilled this old dream by linking Britain and the rest of Europe. The idea of a fixed link between Britain and France was first mooted by a French engineer in 1802; it connects England and France 50m below the seabed of the English Channel. It's not just a tunnel, but a huge infrastructure containing massive machinery and control systems in an underwater tunnel system (Lemley, 1995; Kirkland, 1995). In 1990 the service tunnels broke through at the halfway point. The main rail tunnels met on May 22, 1991 and on June 28, 1991, each accompanied by a …show more content…

Several adaptations to the traditional approaches like agile, interactive, phased, extreme, etc have been made but each will be expected to meet the requirements of the project objectives, timeline, resources, and deliveries of the stakeholders. Other industry standard certifications like ISO9000 and regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley have also influenced methodologies and processes used by several organisations (Kerzner, 2003). Generally, managing projects should involved five major process which include the project initiation, planning, execution, monitoring and controlling, and then project closing. See Fig. 2 below.

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Fig 2: Major Project Management Processes. (Source: US DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS)

The nature and scope of a project is determined at the initiation stage. This involves analyzing the business needs, developing goals, budgets, tasks, deliverables, and the stakeholder analysis. The project planning stage determines the planning team, develops the scope, and identifies work breakdown structure and activities that will be needed to complete deliverables. The planning stage also estimates time and cost activities, develop schedule and risk plan, and gain formal approval for work to begin. The executing stage involves all processes used to meet the project requirement and involves managing people and resources. The process that entails the identification of potential problems and

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