0.1 History of project management

Could the Great Wall of China, the pyramids, or Stonehenge ( [link] ) have been built without project management? It is possible to say that the concept of project management has been around since the beginning of history. It has enabled leaders to plan bold and massive projects and manage funding, materials and labor within a designated time frame.

In late 19 ^th century, in the United States, large-scale government projects were the impetus for making important decisions that became the basis for project management methodology such as the transcontinental railroad, which began construction in the 1860s. Suddenly, business leaders found themselves faced with the daunting task of organizing the manual labor of thousands of workers and the processing and assembly of unprecedented quantities of raw material.

Near the turn of the century, Frederick Taylor ( [link] ) began his detailed studies of work. He applied scientific reasoning to work by showing that labor can be analyzed and improved by focusing on its elementary parts that introduced the concept of working more efficiently, rather than working harder and longer.

Taylor’s associate, Henry Gantt ( [link] ), studied in great detail the order of operations in work and is most famous for developing the Gantt Chart in the 1910s. A Gantt chart is a popular type of bar chart that illustrates a project schedule and have become a common technique for representing the phases and activities of a project work breakdown structure, so they can be understood by a wide audience ( [link] ). Although now considered a common charting technique, Gantt charts were considered quite revolutionary at the time they were introduced. Gantt charts were employed on major infrastructure projects including the Hoover Dam and the Interstate highway system and are still accepted today as an important tool in project.

By the mid Twentieth century, projects were managed on an ad hoc basis using mostly Gantt Charts, and informal techniques and tools. During that time, the Manhattan project was initiated and its complexity was only possible because of project management methods. The Manhattan project was the codename given to the Allied effort to develop the first nuclear weapons during World War II. It involved over thirty different project sites in the US and Canada, and thousands of personnel from US, Canada and UK. Born out of a small research program that began in 1939, the Manhattan Project would eventually employ 130,000 people and cost a total of nearly 2 billion USD and result in the creation of multiple production and research sites operated in secret. The project succeeded in developing and detonating three nuclear weapons in 1945.