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Today we will focus on the historical developments of project management and learn how humans have managed projects since the beginning of civilisation.
History always provides us with lessons that we can draw upon to improve our management of the present.
Forensic analysis of great projects such as the Great Zimbabwe Ruins, Egyptian Pyramids, marine explorations and military operations provides evidence of where the formal tools of modern project management have evolved from.
In spite of the rich history of great projects such as those mentioned above, it was not until the aftermath of World War 2 that the discipline that we now recognise began to take shape.
Most of the tools and concepts generally bound together within the familiar project management framework, were developed between 1940s and early 1970s.
As with so much of current management theory and practice, the initial impetus was provided by the US military and their post- war arms development programme.
Pressure to produce large numbers of sophisticated hardware gave rise to systems still applied by project managers today; PERT (Program Evaluation Review Technique), WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) and Earned Value are three examples which will be examined in this article.
The American pioneers of project management were government-funded and motivated by four distinct but related needs:
The organisational requirement to integrate multiple diverse functions, all collaborating on huge undertakings (the forerunner was the wartime Manhattan project to build an atomic bomb)
The need to estimate and control time investment (in the broad context of an “arms race”).
Quality specifications
The need to assess and limit uncertainty (when often they were attempting wholly original developments)
Their activity triggered private sector innovations where the motive of cost control was uppermost: Critical Path Analysis was developed within the US construction industry in the 1950s, and the concept of precedence in project planning came shortly afterwards.
The 1960s saw recognition of project management as a coherent and self contained discipline, prompted by Gaddi P O’s article in the Harvard Business Review (1959) where he picked out some issues for project managers which remain current, in particular the problem of where projects and their leaders fit within organisational structures.
The same decade witnessed what has been described as the “paradigm of project management”: the Apollo project.
From the perspective of the 21st century, not withstanding an appreciation of its technical achievements, Apollo was favoured by a set of circumstances enjoyed by very few major projects since: A clear, overriding objective and schedule (“a man on the moon by the end of the decade”).
Full funding approval
Unquestioning allocation of the best available resources (human and material) and intense but supportive public interest.
Apollo’s success brought project management techniques to greater prominence.
The Project Management Institute (PMI®) was founded in the US during 1968, management writers began to analyse the place in business of these exciting new tools and ideas.
Two important new concepts were introduced to the management vocabulary; phased project planning and the task force.
In the UK W G Downey of the Ministry of Aviation published a report on project management within the domestic defence industry, highlighting the contribution effective project management could make to cost control.
During the 1970s, particularly in the aftermath of the oil crisis, controlling costs became one of the chief concerns for those involved in managing projects-the other was controlling the project environment.
Many high profile projects suffered during this decade as a result of their failure to anticipate and manage critical external factors, such as political change and public pressure.
A well-known example is the Concord development, which while it partly achieved its technical objective, did so eight times the original budget.
Even though many previous and apparently successful defence developments had been similarly wasteful of resources, such excess would be unacceptable nowadays.
Despite the wealth of experience and analysis that had accumulated around project management by this stage, it was not until the late 1980s that the core techniques and ideas began to be recognised and applied widely in the Western private industry, non technical industry sectors and within small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
Even then, it could be argued that this wider introduction happened for wrong reasons, project management was seized specially by organisations with significant change or downsizing programmes to manage.
But the 1980s also saw some wholly uncontroversial contributions to the expanding project management canon.
The introduction of the risk management techniques and the import from Japan of new project-centred development approaches including simultaneous engineering, partnering and what Tom Peters termed “chunking” (pulling together specialised resources from dispersed locations).
The pacesetters by now were privately owned and at the forefront were the motor vehicle and software development companies, with their emphasis on total quality in production and just in time (JIT) production.
Today project management is widely practiced globally including in Zimbabwe; whether it is widely understood is subject to debate.
For many the discipline is about organising work through the use of (perhaps automated) tools such as Critical Path Analysis and Gantt Charts.
Others concentrate on the human side, managing the expectations of clients and stakeholders, assembling the right team and leading it effectively.
Almost every recent proponent has its own pet issue, be it managing the project environment, making use of I.C.T innovations, or building in effective risk management processes.
Practical project management can encompass all of these aspects and it is the aim of the Project Management Institute of Zimbabwe (PMIZ) to provide a comprehensive understanding of the profession.
l Peter Banda is the Secretary General & Chief Executive of PMIZ. Send your views & comments via email; [email protected] website link www.pmiz.org.zw