We’ve all seen pictures of pyramids. How did they get built? I’m sure that a bunch of folks didn’t get together and swap stories. There was some form of organization that erected these monuments.
Project management was a geek tool until the last five years or so. Why? Especially, now much more has to be done faster with fewer resources. However, times have changed! Now, all organizations from the Girl Scouts to the Department of Defense must get things done on time and on budget while satisfying diverse stakeholders.
I think that the first engineering projects probably can be traced to Egyptian or Mesopotamian pyramids then to Greek and Roman engineering marvels. Many ancient monuments are similar to what we do today in scale and complexity. Think how these ancient projects incorporated the same features of today’s projects. These ancient architects used thousands of often slave laborers to conceive, develop, implement and close out the construction of the project.
More recently, project management matured with the Manhattan Project team developing the atom bomb during the Second World War and more recently NASA’s Apollo project putting a man on the moon. Construction, engineering, and architectural firms then quickly adopted project management as their tool of choice.
Life Lesson Earned: Buy the Project Management Institute (PMI) project management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) standard from Barnes and Noble. Read it. Learn it. Apply it.