History and Approach of Project Management
The history of project management is a diverse one. Different aspects of this process where taken from multiple fields and applications. Some of these fields are engineering, military applications, and construction. In the United States, one of the leading pioneers of project management is Henry Gantt. He was famous for using a bar chart in order to track the process of completing his projects.
The process of project management is also closely connected to scientific management. Frederick Winslow was responsible for promoting scientific management, and the theories of both him and Gantt laid down the foundation for the project management tools that are being used today.
Project management begin to reach a high level of popularity in the 1950s. Before the 1950s, most projects were completed by using informal methods, and they greatly varied in their levels of success. A number of mathematical techniques were used to facilitate the project management process, and these were the Program Evaluation and Review Technique and the Critical Path Method. The PERT was used for the creation of the Polaris missile, and multinational corporations such as Lockheed Martin and DuPont commonly used these techniques. While project management was at first used by large government agencies and corporations, it was eventually adopted by smaller businesses and institutions.
By the late 1960s, the Project Management Institute was created to assist in the development of the project management field. The goal of PMI was to make sure the primary tools and techniques of project management were adopted in a large number of projects, and it was also responsible for creating a common structure. They spent a great deal of time working with both software and construction companies. By 1981, a groundbreaking publication called The Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge was introducted, and this guide specified the techniques and strategies that could be used with project management.
Understand the approach of project management is important for those who wish to use this process successfully. Some of the most popular approached of project management are iterative, incremental, phased, and agile. No matter which approach is used, the team must spend a great deal of time considering the objectives of the project, as well as the responsibilities of those who will be participating in it. The traditional approach of project management is comprised of five elements, and these are the initiation stage, the project planning stage, the execution stage, the monitoring systems stage, and the completion stage.
Some project will not utilize all of these stages. The primary reason for this is because the project could suddenly end before it is completed. A lot of projects do not go through the monitoring phase, and there are some cases where a project will need to go through the first four steps multiple times before the project can be finished successfully. Depending on the industry, there may be a number of variations that exist between each stage. Both software and architectural design will have stages that are more intricate than those that are demonstrated in the traditional project management approach.
Even though each industry will have different names for the various phases of their projects, they are all basically the same in terms of their end goal: to find the problem, analyze the options, pick a path, and implement the path. Once the path has been implemented, the evaluation phase will begin. There are a number of important connections between project management and problem solving. The ability to solve problems is an important skill for this process, and those who are not skilled may cause their projects to fail.
Project management has a long and rich history. The process was created out of a need to make sure objectives and goals could be completed within a set period of time with very few problems. As the United States moved into the Cold War, there was a need to create standardized processes that could allow projects to be completed quickly and efficiently. Even though the Cold War is over, the project management process is commonly used by companies that wish to compete effectively in the Information Age. In our fast paced world of today, projects must be completed quickly and efficiently if a group wants to become successful.
