Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

Conflict Management Planning Contract management Estimating Problem solving Creative thinking Time Management "Project managers bear ultimate responsibility for making things happen. Traditionally, they have carried out this role as mere implementers. To do their jobs they needed to have basic administrative and technical competencies. Today they play a far broader role. In addition to the traditional skills, they need to have business skills, customer relations skills, and political skills. Psychologically, they must be results-oriented self-starters with a high tolerance for ambiguity, because little is clear-cut in today's tumultuous business environment. Shortcomings in any of these areas can lead to project failure." Many things can go wrong in project management. These things are often called barriers. Here are some possible barriers: 1. Poor communication 2. Disagreement 3. Misunderstandings 4. Bad weather 5. Union strikes 6. Personality conflicts 7. Poor management 8. Poorly defined goals and objectives A good project management discipline will not eliminate all risks, issues and surprises, but will provide standard processes and procedures to deal with them and help prevent the following: 1. Projects finishing late, exceeding budget or not meeting customer expectations. 2. Inconsistency between the processes and procedures used by projects managers, leading to some being favored more than others. 3. Successful projects, despite a lack of planning, achieved through high stress levels, goodwill and significant amounts of overtime. 4. Project management seen as not adding value and as a waste of time and money. 5. Unforeseen internal and/or external events impacting the project. Project management is about creating an environment and conditions in which a defined goal or objective can be achieved in a controlled manner by a team of people. Structure 1 A. Contextual reference Transitional markers are words used to link ideas together so that the text is smoother to read. When pronouns such as it, they, them, I, he, she, which, who, whose, that, such, one and demonstrative adjectives such as this, that, these and those, are used as transitional markers. They refer to a word, or words, mentioned earlier in the sentence or paragraph. Their function is to take your thoughts back to something that has already been mentioned. Thus they serve as synonyms or substitutes. Other word swhich are often used to refer backwards are the former, the latter, the first, second, etc. and the last. Sample paragraph A computer(1) like any other machine, is used because, it(1) does certain jobs better and more efficiently than humans. It(1) can receive more information(2) and process it(2) faster than any human. The speed at which a computer works can replace weeks or even months of pencil-and-paper work. Therefore, computers(3) are used when the time saved offsets their(3) cost which is one of the many reasons they(3) are used so much in business, industry and research. Exercise 1 Using the sample paragraph as a model, draw a rectangle around the word/ words and a circle around the word/words that the circled words refer to. Then join the and the with arrows: Computers are electronic machine that process information. They are capable of communicating with the user, of doing different kinds of arithmetic operations and of making three kinds of decisions. However, they are incapable of thinking. They accept data and instructions as input and after processing it, they output the results. B. Making Comparisons 1. Formation There are several ways of showing that similarities or differences exist between or amongst things. The regular comparative and superlative of descriptive words, whether these are adjectives or adverbs is formed as follows: 1. By adding the ending -er and -est to words of one syllable examples: