A brief history of Project Management

PMhistory

Although Project Management has been strengthened in recent years, especially in the U.S., and still is doing in Spain and so will in Latin America, the history of Project Management has a lot of content. Some experts date back to the first megaconstruction in the world, the Pyramids of Giza, completef over 4.500 years ago. Anybody can say how were built, but it’s clear that it required one ore more people taking the oversight of the project.

The history of Project Management as we know it began in the late nineteenth century when the business and corporation world was begging to be more complex and large projects had to be organized systematically. The construction of the U.S. railroad was an example of project where had thousands of employees and logistics of raw materials in quantities never seen before then must be organized and planned.

In the late nineteenth Frederick Taylor conducted scientific studies about the work processes and showed that the work can be analyzed and improved if it is broken down into fundamental parts. No more improve results based on more hours and more effort, only improving the efficiency. His collegue and partner Henry Gantt studied the order of operations in the work, created Gantt Charts, bar containers and milestones that describe the sequence and duration of all tasks of a process. It is an analytical tool so effective that have barely changed in nearly one hundred years. One of the first times it was used for the construction of Hoover Dam in 1931.

After World War II the Dupont Corporation created the CPM or Critical Path Method, a technique that predicted the duration of a project based in the analysis of tasks less flexible in planning. The technique saved $ 1 million to the company the first year it was implemented. In 1958 the U.S. Navy invented the technique PERT or Program Evaluation and Review Technique, a method to analyze the time required to complete each task and identify the minimum (optimal) required to complete the project.

Project Management was professionalized and in 1965 was founded the IPMA (International Project Management Association) and four years later the PMI (Project Management Institute). Since then, the project management has evolved to the point where it currently is one of the most promising professions, most in demand and offer more opportunities to those engaged in it.

Besides the project management tools have been modernized and advanced, applications are now being stored in the cloud, integrate project management, billing and accounting, and are acquired as a suscription, as MySaaSPlace.

About MySaasPlace

MySaaSPlace es la primera solución integrada de gestión de proyectos y facturación en la nube, sencilla y económica, para potenciar la productividad en los negocios.

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