TOCICO

The development of project management thinking and new techniques has at times been slow and deliberate. Perhaps, this is in part, due to the fatalistic feeling that the very nature of project environments contributes to the willingness to accept the status quo. The pyramids and sphinx’s were certainly projects yet how they were built remains as mysterious as the artifacts themselves. Millenniums would go by before Henry Gantt developed the Gantt technique in the 1920’s. In the late 1930’s operations research efforts contributed significantly to better understanding the relationship between task dependencies and the impact of constrained resources that led to the concept of critical path. Then in the late 1950’s the US Navy in collaboration with Booz & Allen developed the Program Evaluation, & Review Technique (PERT). Starting in the 1960’s the emphasis shifted to taking advantage of computers to improve project management. There were many contributors, such as John Fondhal at Stanford University, developing the algorithms that were to become the foundation for the project management software tools that are prevalent today. These tools offered new features to plan, schedule and execute, however, the thinking captured in the algorithms for the most part were not new. It wasn’t until 1997 when Eliyahu Goldratt published the Critical Chain introducing the critical chain technique as an alternative to the critical path did we have the next major change in project management thinking.