Description
The term “project management” refers to the carefully planned and organized effort to complete a specific task in a specific timeline. Project management has been around since the beginning of time. It may not have been called project management and the leaders of the projects may not have considered themselves project managers, but they started with a plan and a goal and they followed a process to accomplish a desired outcome. In other words, they managed the project.
The construction of Stonehenge, the megalithic ruin located on Salisbury Plain in southern England, began in 2950 BC. It is believed that there were three main phases of construction that occurred at different times over a number of years. The last phase of development was concluded in 1650 BC. This would definitely be considered a long-term project by today’s standards! The building of Stonehenge, both the why and the how, remain a mystery and the subject of much speculation to this day. How were the stones moved from their original sites to the site of Stonehenge, which was many, many miles away? What was the purpose of Stonehenge? Was it a giant observatory or a place of worship? There are many theories and legends on the subject, but what interests us most is how they approached this huge undertaking. It is hardly likely that a group of people got together and said, “Let’s bring a lot of big stones from as far away as we can and put them in holes in the ground here,” and then they all went off independently and started moving rocks around. There must have been a vision for what Stonehenge was going to be, a plan for how it would be accomplished, and someone must have coordinated the execution of the plan. A significant amount of manpower would have been needed to move the stones, together with some ingenious method, or methods, for moving them such a great distance. There must have been a reason that those particular stones were the ones that had to be used. We must also assume that there was a design for the arrangement of the stones and a specific purpose for the stone circle after construction was completed. Someone must have managed each phase of the project to accomplish such an amazing feat.
Let’s bring ourselves forward a few thousand years and explore how project management has evolved into the structured discipline it is today. In the early 1900s, Frederick Taylor (1856–1915) began his work on scientifi c management. Up until then, it had been assumed that the only way to increase productivity was to make people work longer and harder. Applying his scientific reasoning to the work being performed in steel mills, Taylor, however, showed that output could be increased by improving the processes used to achieve those outputs. During this same time period, Henry Gantt (1861–1919) studied the order of operations in Navy ship construction before and during WWI. His Gantt charts, task bars, and milestone markers outline the sequence and duration of all tasks in a process. Gantt charts are used to this day as a standard analytical tool for project managers. Gantt is also credited for bringing a human element to management by his emphasis on a favorable work environment having a positive psychological effect on workers. During the few decades up to and including WWII, a growing emphasis on marketing approaches, industrial psychology, and human relations began to further change the face of business management.
In the 1940s, the post-war shortage of labor, combined with the ever-increasing complexity of projects, required changes in organizational structures to support the changing environment. PERT charts and the “critical path” method were introduced. These new methods enabled managers to effectively control intricately engineered and extremely large and complex projects such as military weapon systems. The new management methodologies being utilized for military projects were soon incorporated into other industries as business leaders looked for new ways to manage growth and development in a fast-changing and competitive business environment.
In the early 1960s, general systems theories of science began to emerge as drivers of business processes. At the same time, project management, as a career in its own right, came into being. Since the 1960s, numerous theories, methodologies, and standards have been introduced in the management of systems, knowledge, workfl ow, projects, and data. There has been a growing emphasis on business strategy, organizational change, and human relations skills. Every decade brings with it a need to develop projects with even greater complexity and speed. At the same time, projects must be implemented with fewer resources, lower costs, and higher quality. The ever-increasing diversity and complexity required for managing people, systems, and data has led to the substantial growth in the project management field.
As recently as 15 years ago, project management was not seen as an important or necessary role in many companies. Those companies spent millions of unnecessary dollars and thousands of unnecessary hours implementing projects without the use of the advanced tools, techniques, and methodologies required to create the timelines, cost control, and risk management necessary for cost-effective development. In the last decade, the project management landscape has changed dramatically. It is no longer seen as superfluous middle management but as playing a critical role in meeting business demands for high-quality, quick-to-market products and services.
Project management has gained popularity over the past few decades due to significant changes in the way companies do business. These changes have been driven by the demands of global competition, the introduction of virtual organizations and teams, rapid technological growth, downsizing (requiring more cost-effective and effi cient development), higher-quality goods and services, and faster time to market.
Project management is one of the fastest growing career fields today, and this growth is predicted to continue for the foreseeable future. Project management skills are becoming a required core competency for many management positions in growth- and quality-oriented organizations. Today, project managers are in high demand worldwide to implement projects worth billions of dollars in both the public and the private sector for corporations, governments, and nonprofit organizations.