TABLE OF CONTENTS Project management has emerged because characteristics of our late twentieth-century society demanded the development of new methods and techniques of management, but its roots may be traced back to ancient times. For example, project management was used to a certain degree in constructing historical architectural wonders such as Roman buildings and roads [1].
The origin of the modern project management may be traced back to the late 1950s when Paul O. Gaddis published an article entitled "The Proect Manager" in the Harvard Business Review [2]. This paper discussed the role of the project manager in an advanced-technology industrial sector, the prerequisites for carrying out the project-management task, and the type of training necessary to develop an individual to manage projects. In 1969, the Project Management Institute (PMI) was established, and it has played an instrumental role in the development of the project management field [3]. Today, PMI has around 10,000 members. Since the late 1950s, more than 150 books and hundreds of articles have appeared on various aspects of project management [1].
Project selection may simply be described as the process of evaluating projects, and then choosing to implement some of them to achieve the goals of the parent organization. Thus, project selection is very important to engineering companies, because through the evaluation process, intelligent decisions concerning investment in projects can be made. More specifically, these decisions are crucial to the success or failure of the companies.
There are four objectives of project selection: choose only the...
