Project Management: What is It?

Project management is a process of planning, organizing and managing large and complex undertakings such as construction projects, engineering projects and the development of new products. It involves specific methods of generating plans, defining tasks, making schedules and estimating outcomes. The process is typically built around a five-phase action plan consisting of initiation, planning and design, implementation, monitoring and closing. Project management is a highly optimized and efficient method of achieving goals within specific time and money constraints.

Modern-day project management depends greatly on software programs and templates to keep the project manager and team on the straight and narrow. But people were actually practicing project management for large civil engineering projects during the earliest days of civilization. Yet not until the twentieth century did it become a recognized discipline. That’s when Henri Fayol originated the five management functions of project management; and when Henry Gantt created the Gantt chart as a project management tool. Fayol and Gantt had studied Frederick W. Taylor’s scientific management theories, and his work was the forerunner of some of today’s project management tools such as resource allocation and the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).

The robust growth of America’s industrial-military complex of the 1950s inspired the development of more project management tools. These tools expanded the applications to include planning and scheduling, and cost estimating, management and control, and more. Two of the most well-known tools born in that era were the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), and the Critical Path Method (CPM).

Today’s project management is the domain of professional project managers in such fields as engineering, architecture, construction, information technology, and product development.

How the practice of project management ever made its goals before the advent of computers and project management software is beyond comprehension. But it worked, or civilization wouldn’t have produced the great architectures, infrastructures and products of the centuries.