Assignment No # 1

Muhammad Adnan Karim Reg No: 2131030

History of Project Management

Henry Gantt is the father of planning and control techniques. As a discipline, Project Management developed from different fields of application including construction, engineering and defense. In the United States, the forefather of project management is Henry Gantt, called the father of planning and control techniques, who is famously known for his use of the Gantt chart as a project management tool, for being an associate of Frederick Winslow Taylor's theories of scientific management, and for his study of the work and management of Navy ship building. His work is the forerunner to many modern project management tools including the work breakdown structure (WBS) and resource allocations. The 1950s marked the beginning of the modern Project Management era. Again, in the United States, prior to the 1950s, projects were managed on an ad hoc basis using mostly Gantt Charts, and informal techniques and tools. At that time, two mathematical project scheduling models were developed the "Program Evaluation and Review Technique" or PERT, developed by Booz-Allen & Hamilton as part of the United States Navy's in conjunction with the Lockheed Corporation) Polaris missile submarine program and the "Critical Path Method" (CPM) developed in a joint venture by both DuPont Corporation and Remington Rand Corporation for managing plant maintenance projects. These mathematical techniques quickly spread into many private enterprises. At the same time, technology for project cost estimating, cost management, and engineering economics was evolving, with pioneering work by Hans Lang and others. In 1956, the American Association of Cost Engineers (now AACE International; the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering) was formed by early practitioners of project management and the associated specialties of planning and scheduling, cost estimating, and cost/schedule control (project control). AACE has continued its pioneering work and in 2006 released the first ever integrated process for portfolio, program and project management (Total Cost Management Framework).

Gregory Ballesteros current CEO of PMI In 1969, the Project Management Instititute (PMI) was formed to serve the interests of the project management industry. The premise of PMI is that the tools and techniques of project management are common even among the widespread application of projects from the software industry to the construction industry. In 1981, the PMI Board of Directors authorized the development of what has become A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide), containing the standards and guidelines of practice that are widely used throughout the profession. The International Project Management Association (IPMA), founded in Europe in 1967, has undergone a similar development and instituted the IPMA Competence Baseline (ICB).

History
Project management has evolved to plan, coordinate and control the complex and change and IT diverse activities of modern industrial, commercial and management

projects. All projects share common characteristic the projection of ideas and activities into new endeavours. The ever-present element of risk and uncertainty means that the events and tasks leading to completion can never be foretold with absolute accuracy. Examples abound of projects that have exceeded their costs by enormous amounts, finishing late or even being abandoned before completion. Such failures are far too

common, seen in all kinds of projects in industry, commerce and the public sector. The purpose of project management is to foresee or predict as many of the dangers and problems as possible and to plan, organize and control. The primary aim of the project manager is for the result to satisfy the project sponsor or purchaser and all the other principal stakeholders, within the promised timescale and without using more money and other resources than those that were originally set aside or budgeted. Clearly, manmade

projects are not new: monuments s u r v i v i n g from the earliest civilization testify to the incredible achievements of our forebears and still evoke our wonder and admiration. Modern projects, for all their technological s o p h i s t i c a t i o n , greater in scale than s o m e of those early mammoth are not necessarily

works. But economic pressures of

the industrialized world, competition between rival companies, and greater regard for the value, well-being and hence the employment costs of working people have all contributed to the development of new project management ideas and techniques. is a cursory, rather light-hearted romp through t h e history of project management. It makes generalizations and the dates are approximate, but the story is interesting and an appropriate introduction t o the fascinating subject of project management. Those with the time available to study

an authoritative and comprehensive account of project management history should read Morris (1994). The Early Years: Late 19th Century We can travel back further, though, to the latter half of the 19th century and to the rising complexities of the business world to see how project management evolved from management principles. Large-scale government projects were the impetus for making important decisions that became management decisions. In this country, the first large organization was the transcontinental railroad, which began construction in the early 1870s. Suddenly, business leaders found themselves faced with the daunting task of organizing the manual labour of thousands of workers and the manufacturing and assembly of unprecedented quantities of raw material. Early 20th Century Efforts Near the turn of the century, Frederick Taylor (18561915) began his detailed studies of work. He applied scientific reasoning to work by showing that labour can be analysed and improved by focusing on its elementary parts. He applied his thinking to tasks found in steel mills, such as shovelling sand and lifting and moving parts. Before then, the only way to improve productivity was to demand harder and longer hours from workers. The inscription on Taylor's tomb in Philadelphia attests to his place in the history of management: "the father of scientific management." Taylor's associate, Henry Gantt (18611919), studied in great detail the order of operations in work. His studies of management focused on Navy ship construction during WWI. His Gantt charts, complete with task bars and milestone markers, outline the sequence and duration of all tasks in a process. Gantt chart diagrams proved to be such a powerful analytical tool for managers that they remained virtually unchanged for nearly a hundred years. It wasn't until the early 1990s that link lines were added to these task bars depicting more precise dependencies between tasks. Taylor, Gantt, and others helped evolve management into a distinct business function that requires study and discipline. In the decades leading up to WWII, marketing approaches, industrial psychology, and human relations began to take hold as integral parts of business management.

Mid-20th Century Efforts After WWII, the complexities of projects and a shrinking war-time labour supply demanded new organizational structures. Complex network diagrams called PERT charts and the critical path method were introduced, giving managers greater control over massively engineered and extremely complex projects (such as military weapon systems with their huge variety of tasks and numerous interactions at many points in time). Soon these techniques spread to all types of industries as business leaders sought new management strategies and tools to handle their growth in a quickly changing and competitive world. In the early 1960s, general system theories of science began to be applied to business interactions. Richard Johnson, Fremont Kast, and James Rosenzweig described in their book The Theory and Management of Systems how a modern business is like a human organism, with a skeletal system, a muscular system, circulatory system, nervous system, and so on. Today This view of business as a human organism implies that in order for a business to survive and prosper, all of its functional parts must work in concert toward specific goals, or projects. In the following decades, this approach toward project management began to take root in its modern forms. While various business models evolved during this period, they all shared a common underlying structure especially for large.