From Gantt charts to Microsoft Project, the evolution of project management is a rich and fascinating story
So all pervasive is project management in today's corporate society that it seems strange that there was a time when its techniques and methodologies were not common practice in organisations the world over.
Indeed it is only relatively recently that project management as we know it today began to be implemented in businesses and institutions. This is not to say that before project management tasks and projects were carried out in anarchy and disarray but it is true that there was no over-riding philosophy behind the process and development of these projects.
Throughout history vast engineering projects were overseen by a master architect such as Wren or Brunel with an army of minions catering to his every whim. In the early years of the twentieth century a significant breakthrough was made in terms of applying structure and science to such tasks when Henry Gantt developed his now legendary chart. Whilst it may seem incredibly crude and functional in the twenty first century world of specialised computer software and online collaboration the Gantt chart was a revolutionary new tool at the time, the first time an attempt had been made to measure and analyse the development of a project.
Contemporaneously with Gantt's innovation a Frenchman called Henri Fayol was developing his five primary functions of management which, although they would not be widely circulated outside France for a good thirty years, became fundamental to the modern conception of project management. These functions are to forecast and plan, to organise, to command, to co-ordinate and to control, and whilst they may appear self-evident to any contemporary Project Manager nobody else was acknowledging these principles back in 1916.
It was not until the 1950s that project management as we would recognise it today began to evolve. The Gantt charts that businesses had been using were suddenly expanded into two more sophisticated mathematical models; the Critical Path Method (CPM) and the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT).
CPM examines the inter-relationship between the activities required within a given project and the duration that each activity will take. Using this data CPM creates the longest path of planned activities to completion of the project. PERT is used primarily for big, single and complex events such as sporting tournaments and festivals where time is the key priority rather than money. There is a certain amount of overlap between the two methodologies and both revitalised the nature of project management after the war.
However, all this pioneering work would have been merely hypothetical had practical concerns such as costing not seen major developments at the same time. 1956 saw the creation of the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering, a pivotal body in the history of project management that continues to examine, analyse and innovate in the areas of cost management and engineering economics. From there it was a short step to the founding of the International Project Management Association (IPMA) in 1967, the final stage in project management's journey for acceptance and universal implementation.
The world of project management never stays static for long and the constant technological advances of the last couple of decades mean that the levels of sophistication have risen dramatically. Yet it does us all good to remember and reflect on the trailblazing work of Gantt, Fayol and many others in those early days as without them the world of project management could well be a lot less healthy.
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