Project Management

History and approaches

Brief background
Project management has been practiced since early civilization. Until
1900 civil engineering projects were generally managed by
creative architects and engineers themselves, among those for
example Vitruvius (1st century BC), Christopher Wren (16321723)
, Thomas Telford (17571834) and Isambard Kingdom Brunel
(18061859).[6] It was in the 1950s that organizations started to
systematically apply project management tools and techniques to
complex engineering projects

Fathers of Project
management
As a discipline, Project Management
Henry Gantt

developed from several fields of

application including civil
construction, engineering, and
heavy defense activity.[8] Two
forefathers of project management
are Henry Gantt, called the father of
planning and control techniques,[9]
who is famous for his use of the
Gantt chart as a project
management tool; and Henri Fayol
for his creation of the 5
management functions which form
the foundation of the body of
knowledge associated with project
and program management.[10] Both
Gantt and Fayol were students of
Frederick Winslow Taylor's theories

Gantt Chart

The progress
The 1950s marked the beginning of the modern Project Management
era where core engineering fields come together working as one.
Project management became recognized as a distinct discipline
arising from the management discipline with engineering model. [11]
In the United States, prior to the 1950s, projects were managed on
an ad hoc basis using mostly Gantt Charts, and informal techniques
and tools. At that time, two mathematical project-scheduling models
were developed. The "Critical Path Method" (CPM) was developed as
a joint venture between DuPont Corporation and
Remington Rand Corporation for managing plant maintenance
projects. And the "Program Evaluation and Review Technique" or
PERT, was developed by Booz Allen Hamilton as part of the
United States Navy's (in conjunction with the Lockheed Corporation)
Polaris missile submarine program;[12] These mathematical
techniques quickly spread into many private enterprises.

Progress continued..

At the same time, as project-scheduling models were being

developed, technology for project cost estimating, cost
management, and engineering economics was evolving,
with pioneering work by Hans Lang and others. In 1956, the
American Association of Cost Engineers (now
AACE International; the Association for the Advancement of
Cost Engineering) was formed by early practitioners of
project management and the associated specialties of
planning and scheduling, cost estimating, and
cost/schedule control (project control). AACE continued its
pioneering work and in 2006 released the first integrated
process for portfolio, program and project management (
Total Cost Management Framework).

Legal body Formation

The International Project Management Association (IPMA) was

founded in Europe in 1967,[13] as a federation of several national
project management associations. IPMA maintains its federal
structure today and now includes member associations on every
continent except Antarctica. IPMA offers a Four Level Certification
program based on the IPMA Competence Baseline (ICB).[14] The ICB
covers technical competences, contextual competences, and
behavioral competences.

In 1969, the Project Management Institute (PMI) was formed in the

USA.[15] PMI publishes
A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK
Guide), which describes project management practices that are
common to "most projects, most of the time." PMI also offers
multiple certifications.

The American Academy of Project Management (AAPM)

International Board of Standards 1996 was the first to institute
post-graduate certifications such as the MPM Master Project
Manager, PME Project Management E-Business, CEC Certified-

Approaches
to
Project
Management

The
Basics

There are a number of approaches to managing

project activities including agile, interactive,
incremental, and phased approaches.
Regardless of the methodology employed, careful
consideration must be given to the overall project
objectives, timeline, and cost, as well as the roles
and responsibilities of all participants and
stakeholders.

The traditional approach

A traditional phased approach identifies a sequence of steps to be completed.
In the "traditional approach", we can distinguish 5 components of a project
(4 stages plus control) in the development of a project:

Typical development phases of an engineering project

Project initiation stage;
Project planning and design stage;
Project execution and construction stage;
Project monitoring and controlling systems;
Project completion.

Traditional Approach

KEY POINT:
Not all the projects will visit every stage as projects can be
terminated before they reach completion. Some projects do not
follow a structured planning and/or monitoring stages. Some
projects will go through steps 2, 3 and 4 multiple times.

Another View of Tradition Approach

Traditional Approach
Many industries use variations on these project stages. For
example, when working on a brick and mortar design and
construction, projects will typically progress through stages
like
Pre-Planning,
Conceptual Design,
Schematic Design,
Design Development,
Construction Drawings (or Contract Documents), and
Construction Administration.
In software development, this approach is often known as the
waterfall model,[16] i.e., one series of tasks after another in
linear sequence.
In software development many organizations have adapted
the Rational Unified Process (RUP) to fit this methodology,
although RUP does not require or explicitly recommend this
practice.

Critical Chain Project

Management
Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) is a method of planning
and managing projects that puts more emphasis on the resources
(physical and human) needed in order to execute project tasks.
The most complex part involves engineering professionals of
different fields (Civil, Electrical, Mechanical etc) working together.
It is an application of the Theory of Constraints (TOC) to projects.
The goal is to increase the rate of throughput (or completion rates)
of projects in an organization. Applying the first three of the five
focusing steps of TOC, the system constraint for all projects is
identified as are the resources. To exploit the constraint, tasks on
the critical chain are given priority over all other activities. Finally,
projects are planned and managed to ensure that the resources
are ready when the critical chain tasks must start, subordinating
all other resources to the critical chain.

CCPM continued..
Regardless of project type, the project plan should undergo
Resource Leveling, and the longest sequence of resourceconstrained tasks should be identified as the critical chain.
In multi-project environments, resource leveling should be
performed across projects. However, it is often enough to
identify (or simply select) a single "drum" resourcea
resource that acts as a constraint across projectsand
stagger projects based on the availability of that single
resource

Theory of Constraints (TOC)

is an overall management philosophy introduced by

Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt in his 1984 book titled
The Goal, that is geared to help organizations
continually achieve their goal.[1] The title comes from
the contention that any manageable system is
limited in achieving more of its goal by a very small
number of constraints, and that there is always at
least one constraint. The TOC process seeks to
identify the constraint and restructure the rest of
the organization around it, through the use of the
Five Focusing Steps.

TOC ( Theory of
constraints )

The title Theory of Constraints

(TOC) adopts the common idiom "A
chain is no stronger than its weakest
link" as a new management
paradigm. This means that processes,
organizations, etc, are vulnerable
because the weakest person or part
can always damage or break them or
at least reduce the outcome.

The analytic approach with TOC

comes from the contention that any
manageable system is limited in
achieving more of its goals by a very
small number of constraints, and that
there is always at least one
constraint. Hence the TOC process

TOC 5
focusing
steps
Assuming the goal of the organization has been articulated (e.g.,
"Make money now and in the future") the steps are:
1- Identify the constraint (the resource or policy that
prevents the organization from obtaining more of the goal)
2- Decide how to exploit the constraint (get the most capacity
out of the constrained process)
3- Subordinate all other processes to above decision (align
the whole system or organization to support the decision
made above)
4- Elevate the constraint (make other major changes needed
to break the constraint)
5- If, as a result of these steps, the constraint has moved,
return to Step 1. Don't let inertia become the constraint.[3]

Extreme Project
Management

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. [
citation needed]
Most of them are aimed at very large-scale, one-time,
non-routine projects, and nowadays all kinds of management are
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[citation needed]. Instead, project
management experts try to identify different "lightweight" models,
such as Agile Project Management methods including
Extreme Programming for software development and Scrum
techniques.

The generalization of Extreme Programming to other kinds of

projects is extreme project management, which may be used in
combination with the process modeling and management

Extreme Project
Management

The Program (or Project)

Evaluation and Review Technique,
commonly abbreviated PERT, is a
model for project management
designed to analyze and represent
the tasks involved in completing a
given project. It is commonly used in
conjunction with the
critical path method or CPM.

Event chain methodology

Event chain methodology is another method that

complements critical path method and critical chain project
management methodologies.
Event chain methodology is an uncertainty modeling and
schedule network analysis technique that is focused on
identifying and managing events and event chains that
affect project schedules. Event chain methodology helps to
mitigate the negative impact of psychological heuristics
and biases, as well as to allow for easy modeling of
uncertainties in the project schedules. Event chain
methodology is based on the following principles.

Fishbone analysis view of

Project

Project Management for Software