Roots of Project Management

I just wrapped up teaching an MBA level course in project management at Loyola University. I started doing project management in the 1970s and it has been an essential, albeit secondary, element of my skill set. During the course, I found it useful to look back to some of the origins of the field. Project management can be a second class citizen in many business schools; it feels too pedestrian next to courses on disruptive innovation or venture finance. I went looking for some interesting history to put these skills in broader context.

In that search I came across several papers that offer important perspectives on today’s practices and conventional wisdom. You can track them down from these links:

• PERT, Polaris, and the realities of project execution: International Journal of Managing Projects in Business: Vol 5, No 4
• Lost Roots: How Project Management Settled on the Phased Approach, INSEAD Working Paper
• Managing the Development of Large Software Systems, IEEE WESCON 26

The first two papers take a look at the U.S. Defense Department programs from the Cold War that created the Polaris submarine and also promoted a story of advanced management techniques that was a more complex mix of technique and internal marketing than we usually acknowledge.

The third paper by Winston Royce is often credited as being the origin of the waterfall software development model that held sway for many years and is now ridiculed as often as it is praised. It’s revealing to take a look at what Royce actually said compared to what followed.

I find it valuable to balance knowledge of particular tools and techniques with a more general sense of the history and organizational realities that shape our use and understanding of those tools.