Project Management Resources & Links
A Short History of Project Management
The concept pf project management has been around since the beginning of history. Think of the Temple of Solomon, the Roman structures scattered throughout England or even the Egyptian pyramids. These were massive projects where funding, materials and labor had to be managed and coordinated within a time frame to complete a project. It is fair to say that in those days, project managers truly ruled with a whip.
With the start of the industrial revolution the needs of business and industry became more complicated and often grew in scale. The need to manage a budget, supplies and labor often across the country or even worse, another continent, was really the ultimate test of management skills.
Science Meets Productivity
In the early 190'’s Frederick Taylor tested his scientific theories on improving worker productivity by creating a methodology for the measuring and performance of certain tasks by workers in steel mills. His studies looked into finding better ways to be productive than merely demanding harder work and longer hours from employees. Taylor died in Philadelphia and the inscription on his tomb stone assures his place in history: "the father of scientific management."
Taylor’s associate Henry Gantt invented charts and diagrams to document and measure the processes involved in Navy ship building during WWI. This enabled him to see the big picture and analyze all the functions involved in ship building. The Gantt chart became an important tool for project management and has been used for the last 100 years.
Project Management in the Modern World
But it wasn’t until the 1950’s that project management as we know it today, came into being. Russia’s lead in missile technology became an important issue when members of the U.S. military questioned the so called “missile gap”. The safety of the nation was at stake and the military needed to put their own missile program in place immediately. A project management program called PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) devised by Willard Fazar was put into place to manage the program. PERT charts followed a critical path methodology allowing managers control over huge and complex projects that involved complicated tasks and logistics. Today, PERT is still the standard for all U.S. Navy Projects.
During the 1960s science principles were being applied to business methodology. The most important theory that a business or company could be compared to the human body. A business has skeletal, muscular, circulatory and nervous systems in place just like a human. In the human body when those systems integrated and worked together successfully they produced life or in the case of business, carried out a project.
What is Project Management?
So in today's terms, what is project management? In simple terms, it is having the "know how" and using the “know how” to bring about a certain "happening". It involves initiating, planning, execution, monitoring, controlling and completing a plan or project as specified. It involves expertise in estimating costs and resources, procurement of resources and supplies, organizing teams and work loads, directing and assigning roles, status reporting to upper management, risk assessment, time management and communication at all levels.
Globalization has helped elevate the importance of project management worldwide since many companies are expanding or setting up new businesses in other countries. The need for new and more sophisticated tools to accomplish complicated project management functions has evolved through the design and manufacture of web based project management software.
Web based project management allows you and your team to communicate in real time from anywhere in the world. Top notch project management software should be feature rich, make up-to-date project status always available and be easy to use. It should be customizable and flexible enough to meet the manager’s requirements and designed to interface with other software. Many software products today have these features.
Just think what those poor souls who built the Great Wall of China could have done if they had gotten their hands on some project management software!
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