Brief History of Project Management

Imagine that an important customer in your firm commissions you to complete a sophisticated worldwide market study that will form the basis of a global expansion strategy. Or that you are responsible for the development of the product which will determine your firm’s ability to go public. Or that you are in charge of handling the merger of your firm with another. Further imagine that in these situations you receive a strict budget and a precise schedule. You are, as such, involved in a project—and, moreover, you are involved in managing a project. Deliverables must be completed according to a schedule, which is usually aggressive, and within a budget, which is usually fixed.

Because project management focuses on specific results (deliverables), time and (schedule), resources (money, people, etc.), a series of techniques and processes has evolved to help people efficiently manage these undertakings. This module will introduce these to you.

The Origins Of Project Management
“Work” was first scientifically studied by Frederick Taylor (1856-1915), who also was the first to consider process design. But not until the early 1950s were many project management techniques assembled into a single, coherent system: the focus of that enormously complex effort was the U.S.

Defense Department’s development of the Polaris missile. The techniques, which included Henry Gantt’s chart, which he created to manage Army logistics, were essential to managing the intricacies of how work among an array of specialists would be handed off, and how the schedule itself would be managed. At the center of this effort was literally a project “war room,” which prominently displayed huge Program Evaluation Review Techniques (PERT) charts.

Following quickly in the military’s footsteps were the automotive and movie industries, and private and public engineering organizations. All shared the need for creating unique outcomes, and they found that project management techniques helped cross-functional teams define, manage, and execute the work needed to accomplish these ends. Along with such techniques as histograms and network diagrams, early practitioners of project management also employed the concept of a project life cycle and began to incorporate that thinking when generating more complex Work Breakdown Structures (WBSs). A WBS comprehensively identifies the individual tasks required to achieve an objective.

More recently, new project management techniques (e.g., for creating cross-functional schedules, managing shared resources, and aligning project portfolios), the widespread use of personal computers, and the growing sophistication and availability of project management software tools have all increased the effectiveness of a methodology for addressing a variety of project problems.

The Emerging Importance of Projects
But it is not simply the improvement of project management effectiveness that we are examining; other forces combined to cause the use of these techniques to explode. Powerful competitive pressures to manage and reduce product cycle time are increasing, as is the globalization of many markets and the recognition of projects as a key link between the strategic goals of the organization and the tactical work being performed by discrete functions.

As a result, industries as diverse as computer manufacturing, consulting services, pharmaceuticals, photography, and natural resource management have aggressively implemented project management. These industries, and a myriad of others, are using project management as a way to create the future, by better understanding both customer requirements and solutions to meet them. Moreover, project management has a potent effect on a firm’s bottom line.

An international study found that “when companies increased their predevelopment emphasis, they increased the predictability of successful new-product commercialization by a 2-to-1 ratio.” When predevelopment activities, primarily project definition and planning, increased, so did the likelihood of product success. Some key factors separating success from failure were:
• “Winners spent more than twice as many resources on predevelopment activities as did losers.
• Seventy-one percent of new-product development was delayed due to poor definition and understanding of customer requirements.
• Changing product requirements induced more delays in product development than any other cause.” (Boznak, 1994)

Project management also affects the bottom-line because it helps cross-functional teams to work smarter. It enables teams to better draw upon the individual strengths of members by providing an efficient infrastructure for defining, planning, and managing project work, regardless of the structure of the firm’s organization.

It is particularly useful in specialized functional environments or highly matrixed environments, since it channels specialization into clearly defined project cooperation and contribution activities and clarifies ambiguous roles and responsibilities. Thus, as one author observed, “Team members derive value from the summary data for project planning, estimation of tasks, and identifying improvement opportunities, such as activities that ought to have more (or less) time devoted to them.

The data provides a quantitative understanding of the group’s development process as well as a way to monitor of the process over time. It has been enlightening to many team members to compare where they think they spend their time with where they actually spend their time” (Wiegers, 1994).

Similarly, “Successful firms have mastered the art of melding the power of human will and organization. But the key to their vitality is their world class capabilities in selecting, guiding, and completing development projects, which are the building blocks of renewal and change. The companies that can repeat this process again and again have discovered the manufacturer’s perpetual motion machine” (Bowen, Clark, Holloway and Wheelwright, 1994, p. 14).

As yet a further example of this impact, Integrated Project Systems conducted two studies (unpublished) in which one computer manufacturer gained a 500% return on investment in project management by creating a project plan template for repetitive projects, and another had an estimated 900% return on investment through an early cancellation of a troubled project. ROI on implementing project management appears to be quite significant.

Fonte: Harvard Business School 9-697-034, Rev. October 6, 1997

Colaboração de Fernanda Schwarzstein