Project management developed in its modern form, only a few decades ago. Businesses and other organizations began to see the profit of organizing work around projects which led to the boom in the market. In the business set-up the overall project-centric view evolved further as organizations began to understand the critical need for their employees to communicate and team up in order to integrate their work structure accordingly.
Initially the only way to improve productivity was to demand harder work and longer hours from workers. Later, Taylor introduced the concept of working more efficiently, rather than working harder and longer
Taylor’s associate, Henry Gantt (1861–1919), studied in great detail the order of operations in work. Thereafter, Gantt Charts were introduced which provided task bars and milestone markers, together with an outlined 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.
Thereafter, Microsoft Office Project added link lines to these task bars, depicting more precise dependencies between tasks. Microsoft Office Project packed even more information into the lines, such as progress lines against a baseline, variances, and lines depicting status progress at a particular point in time.
But in today’s time the overall view of business has changed a lot. For a business to survive and prosper, all its functional parts must work in accordance specific goals, or projects. This approach toward project management began to take root in its modern forms.
Common underlying structure of a business model,
- Project manager manages the project
- Puts together a team
- Ensures the integration and communication of the workflow horizontally across different departments.
Emerging Trends
Bottom-up planning
This approach emphasizes on simpler project designs, shorter project cycles, efficient collaboration among team members, stronger team member involvement and decision making. Bottom-up planning approach is also known as agile project management, which includes various related methodologies, such as Scrum, Crystal, Extreme Programming, Unified Process, and many others.
Top-down planning and reviewing
This approach is portrayed by an enterprise-wide decision making about the portfolio of projects that an organization should have, together with enabling data-mining technologies to make information in the portfolio more clear.
