|
Project management was not used as an isolated concept before the Sputnik crisis of the Cold War. After this crisis,
the United States Department of Defense needed to speed up the military project process and new tools (models) for
achieving this goal were invented. In 1958 they invented the Program Evaluation and Review Technique or PERT, as part
of the Polaris missile submarine program. At the same time, the DuPont corporation invented a similar model called CPM,
critical path method. PERT was later extended with a work breakdown structure or WBS. The process flow and structure of
the military undertakings quickly spread into many private enterprises.
There are a number of guiding techniques that have been developed over the years that can be used to formally specify
exactly how the project will be managed. These include the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), and such ideas
as the Personal Software Process (PSP), and the Team Software Process (TSP) and PRINCE2. These techniques attempt to
standardize the practices of the development team making them easier to predict and manage as well as track.
Critical chain is the latest extension to the traditional critical path method.
In critical studies of project management, it has been noted that several of these fundamentally PERT-based models are
not well suited for the multi-project company environment of today. Most of them are aimed at very large-scale, one-time,
non-routine project, and nowadays all kinds of management is expressed in terms of projects. Using complex models for
"projects" (or rather "tasks") spanning a few weeks has been proven to cause unnecessary costs and low maneuverability
in several cases. Instead project management experts try to identify different "lightweight" models, such as, for example
Extreme Programming for software development and Scrum techniques. The generalization of extreme programming to other kinds
of projects is extreme project management.
Related Topics
Project management software
Project Planning
|