Project Management History

THE HISTORY OF PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Project management has been around since the beginning of time. Noah was a project manager. It took careful planning and execution to construct the ark and gather two of every animal on earth, including all the necessary food and water. The pyramids of Egypt stand today because of countless successful projects and project managers. Although there have been brilliant project managers over the years, project management was not recognized as a formal management concept until operations research in the 1950s and 1960s pioneered methods and specialized Tools to manage expensive, high-profile aerospace projects such as Polaris and Apollo. NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense established project management standards that they expected their contractors to follow.

In the middle and late 1960s, business managers began searching for new techniques and organizational structures that would help them adapt quickly to changing environments.

The 1970s and 1980s brought more published data on project management, leading to the development of theories, methods, and standards. The construction industry,

for example, saw the potential benefits of formal project management and began to adopt standards and develop new techniques.

Large-scale initiatives such as quality improvement and re-engineering provided data, analysis, and problem-solving techniques, but no structured discipline to implement them. Therefore, managers turned to project management for direction in implementing and tracking such large-scale projects.

By the 1990s, industries in both profit and nonprofit sectors realized that the size and complexity of their activities were unmanageable without formal project management processes and tools.