High quality cost estimating gives a business leader confidence to make rational financial decisions. Whether you are a business leader or a cost estimating manager, you have a vested interest in understanding whether you can depend on your organisation's ability to generate accurate cost forecasts and estimates. But how can business leaders have confidence that the cost information that they are being provided with is of high quality? How can a cost estimating manager be sure that their team is providing high quality cost information? QinetiQ's Cost Engineering Health Check is used as a capability benchmarking tool to identify improvement opportunities within their clients' cost estimating capability, enabling them to focus on areas that have the potential to increase their competitiveness. High quality estimating leads to accurate budgets, a reduced potential for cost growth, accurate evaluation of risk exposure, and the opportunity to implement effective earned value management (EVM). The Cost Engineering Health Check employs a standardised competency framework that considers all aspects of cost estimating capability, and provides an objective assessment against both best practice and the industry standard. This framework is based on QinetiQ's long established, tried and tested, Knowledge Based Estimating (KBE) philosophy comprising Data, Tools, People and Process, with additional consideration given to cultural and stakeholder assessments.

High quality cost estimating gives a business leader confidence to make rational financial decisions. Whether you are a business leader or a cost estimating manager, you have a vested interest in understanding whether you can depend on your organisation's ability to generate accurate cost forecasts and estimates. But how can business leaders have confidence that the cost information that they are being provided with is of high quality? How can a cost estimating manager be sure that their team is providing high quality cost information? QinetiQ's Cost Engineering Health Check is used as a capability benchmarking tool to identify improvement opportunities within their clients' cost estimating capability, enabling them to focus on areas that have the potential to increase their competitiveness. High quality estimating leads to accurate budgets, a reduced potential for cost growth, accurate evaluation of risk exposure, and the opportunity to implement effective earned value management (EVM). The Cost Engineering Health Check employs a standardised competency framework that considers all aspects of cost estimating capability, and provides an objective assessment against both best practice and the industry standard. This framework is based on QinetiQ's long established, tried and tested, Knowledge Based Estimating (KBE) philosophy comprising Data, Tools, People and Process, with additional consideration given to cultural and stakeholder assessments.

Downsizing, outsourcing and the accelerating pace of change have led to project management becoming one of today's hottest disciplines. Project management is about managing ad hoc, one-off projects instead of ongoing operations. Effective project management delivers better ROI, better benefits realization. Focusing on diagnostics, tangible outcomes and solutions, The Success Healthcheck for IT Projects identifies 8 leading indicators of success, ranging from how the project is set-up, to it's ability to deliver results within the business. The book covers how to assess the likely success of the project using the current IT project portfolio track record and provides diagnostics for a specific project. It shares over 35 real life stories from projects in a direct, pacey conversational style. On the $10,000 project, these methods provide focus. In very large IT based transformation projects, these methods have saved up to $30,000,000 and improved benefits between 20-80%. This is for project team, project manager, portfolio managers, CIOs and the business executives who want business benefits to be realized. This books helps project sponsors and project managers deliver Predictable Accountable Results (PAR) from projects.

This book includes a collection of state-of-the-art contributions addressing both theoretical developments in, and successful applications of, seismic structural health monitoring (S2HM). Over the past few decades, Seismic SHM has expanded considerably, due to the growing demand among various stakeholders (owners, managers and engineering professionals) and researchers. The discipline has matured in the process, as can be seen by the number of S2HM systems currently installed worldwide. Furthermore, the responses recorded by S2HM systems hold great potential, both with regard to the management of emergency situations and to ordinary maintenance needs. The book’s 17 chapters, prepared by leading international experts, are divided into four major sections. The first comprises six chapters describing the specific requirements of S2HM systems for different types of civil structures and infrastructures (buildings, bridges, cultural heritage, dams, structures with base isolation devices) and for monitoring different phenomena (e.g. soil-structure interaction and excessive drift). The second section describes available methods and computational tools for data processing, while the third is dedicated to hardware and software tools for S2HM. In the book’s closing section, five chapters report on state-of-the-art applications of S2HM around the world.

This double volume set ( LNAI 10863-10864) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th International Workshop, EG-ICE 2018, held in Lausanne, Switzerland, in June 2018. The 58 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 108 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on Advanced Computing in Engineering, Computer Supported Construction Management, Life-Cycle Design Support, Monitoring and Control Algorithms in Engineering, and BIM and Engineering Ontologies.