The History of Project Management (Lessons from History)

Product Description

The Pyramid of Giza, the Colosseum, and the Transcontinental Railroad are all great historical projects from the past four millennia. When we look back, we tend to look at these as great architectural or engineering works. Project management tends to be overlooked, and yet its core principles were used extensively in these projects. This book takes a hard look at the history of project management and how it evolved over the past 4,500 years. It shows that “modern” project management practices did not just appear in the past 100 years but have been used – often with a lot of sophistication – for thousands of years. Examining archaeological evidence, artwork, and surviving manuscripts, this book provides evidence of how each of the nine knowledge areas of project management (as shown in PMI’s PMBoK® Guide) have been practiced throughout the ages. The book covers the period from the construction of the ancient pyramids up to the 1940s. A future companion volume will cover more recent developments during the war years and the technology boom leading up to the present. As readers explore the many case studies in this book, they will discover fascinating details of innovative projects that produced many of our most famous landmarks and voyages of discovery.

Review

“Mark’s latest book illustrates that the knowledge and disciplines articulated in the PMBoK Guide have been leveraged successfully by our project management predecessors across centuries.”

— Jim Hayden, PMP, CSM, Former President, PMI CVC

“I have used Titanic lessons for projects and Project lessons from The Great Escape in my graduate classes for several years and now intend to use the History of Project Management as well. The series is an effective and creative way to promote student learning and generate class discussion.”

–Professor Ryan Nelson, University of Virginia

“Mark helps us to recognise, in his examination of the deciding features of a project, that little has changed over the last four thousand years.”

–Martin Price, Past Director of PMI UK

“This title is certainly the most comprehensive analysis of the use of basic tenants of modern Project Management across recorded history.”

–Glenn LeClair, CMC

The importance of lessons learned and historical information, confirms that project managers have existed for thousands of years and have learned from their predecessors mistakes and successes.

–Linda F. Desmond, PMP Past President PMI Mass Bay

From the Author

Background to this Publication

This has been a massive undertaking for me personally, and for the Lessons From History Series.
The story started somewhere between the publication of my books on the Titanic project (2005) and The Great Escape (2006). I was reviewing the approach to Project Lessons from the Great Escape (Stalag Luft III) with my publisher Kevin Aguanno (at Multi-Media Publications). He had challenged me to take a more rigorous approach that looked at the story line through the lens of a modern project manager, and hence the idea came about of looking at the event from each of the PMBoK® Guide’s nine knowledge areas. This provided an approach that we could now use with the latest planned publichation The History of Project Management

Initially, I had difficulty getting started because the subject was so daunting. Also, there wasn’t much information readily available with no known books or research on the topic. It looked as if few had ever tried to research the history of projects from a project management perspective. Of course there were plenty of books that concentrated on the outputs or the final deliverables of ancient projects, but the authors focused on architecture or engineering practices. These books were rooted in the technicalities of the achievement, the aesthetic splendour of the output, or an architectural examination of the form. There were few references to how the projects were initiated, planned, and executed.

My first major