Five highlights in project management’s history
Project management is not a new concept, even though we have been using the term more frequently during the last two decades. Ever since the dawn of mankind, humans have carried out a variety of projects and tasks, some of them grand in scale and others smaller, by appointing someone in charge of them, someone that will guide others towards fruitful completion.
Let’s take a trip in the past and discover some of the milestones in modern project management history that led us to the current state!
First Stop: 1917 and The Gantt Chart
Henry Gantt has long been considered the father of project management, due to the creation of his eponymous revolutionary chart. Wikipedia offers a short description of it:
“A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart that illustrates a project schedule. This chart lists the tasks to be performed on the vertical axis, and time intervals on the horizontal axis. The width of the horizontal bars in the graph shows the duration of each activity. Gantt charts illustrate the start and finish dates of the terminal elements and summary elements of a project. Terminal elements and summary elements constitute the work breakdown structure of the project. Modern Gantt charts also show the dependency (i.e., precedence network) relationships between activities. Gantt charts can be used to show current schedule status using percent-complete shadings and a vertical “TODAY” line as shown here.”
A notable project that was executed based on the Gantt chart was the Hoover Dam and with the advent of the personal computers in the 1980s, Gantt Charts have become more intricate and are now available online.
Second Stop: 1957 and CPM
The Critical Path Method (CPM) was developed by Morgan R. Walker of DuPont and James E. Kelley Jr. of Remington Rand and is used to predict the duration of a project. To determine what constitutes a critical path, one needs to identify “the longest stretch of dependent activities and measuring the time required to complete them from start to finish.” CPM was famously employed in the construction of the Twin Towers in New York.
Third Stop: 1969 and PMI
The Project Management Institute was founded in 1969 as a non-profit professional organization with the goal to promote and further mature the project management profession. The publication of “A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge”, a set of standard terminology and guidelines, is one of the many notable contributions of PMI, which also offers two levels of project management certification: Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM) and Project Management Professional (PMP).
Fourth Stop: 1986 and Scrum
Τhe term Scrum made its first appearance in a 1986 paper published in the Harvard Business Review and called “The New New Product Development Game” by management experts Takeuchi and Nonaka.
Fifth Stop: 2001 and The Agile Manifesto
The Agile Manifesto sought to revolutionize the delivery of software products, serving as the answer to various problems that have been made evident during the ’90s. Seventeen thought leaders gathered in 2001 and produced the Agile Manifesto and the Twelve Principles of Agile Software. The rest is history…
