Evolutuion of Project Management

The History of Project Management
Project management began to take root only a few decades ago. It started in the early 1960s, businesses and other organizations began to see the benefit of organizing work around projects and to understand the critical need to communicate across multiple departments and professions.

The Early Years: Late 19th Century
The latter half of the 19th century, project management evolved from management principles. Large-scale government projects were the impetus for making important decisions that became management decisions. In this country, the first large organization was the transcontinental railroad, which began construction in the early 1870s. Suddenly, business leaders found themselves faced with the daunting task of organizing the manual labor of thousands of workers and the manufacturing and assembly of unprecedented quantities of raw material.

Early 20th Century
Efforts Near the turn of the century, Frederick Taylor (1856-1915) began his detailed studies of work. He applied scientific reasoning to work by showing that labor can be analyzed and improved by focusing on its elementary parts. He applied his thinking to tasks found in steel mills, such as shoveling sand and lifting and moving parts. The inscription on Taylor's tomb in Philadelphia attests to his place in the history of management: "the father of scientific management." Taylor's associate, Henry Gantt (1861-1919), studied in great detail the order of operations in work. His studies of management focused on Navy ship construction during WWI. His Gantt charts, complete with task bars and milestone markers, outline the sequence and duration of all tasks in a process. Gantt chart diagrams proved to be such a powerful analytical tool for managers that they remained virtually unchanged for nearly a hundred years. It wasn't until the early 1990s that link lines were added to these task bars depicting more precise dependencies between tasks.