History of the Development of Project Management Tools

Think about building a house without any plan or schedule. Do you think it’s possible? Now, think about building the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Great Wall of China. Do you still think it’s viable to construct something without a proper plan, coordination, and control? The truth is, people have been managing projects and operations for thousands of years.

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Even when no one knew such words as Agile, retrospective, and work breakdown structure, they already used some primitive project management techniques and tools that laid down a foundation for modern standards and technologies. Let’s explore what these tools looked like and where they come from!

Early PM Methods

Managing the Construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza

Constructing the Great Pyramid of Giza around 2560 BCE wasn’t just an extraordinary accomplishment for that time, but also a great example of management of such an impressive project. This wasn’t just building something and stacking stones. It was necessary to coordinate the work of over 100,000 people for two decades, managing the provision of food and materials, and maintaining construction standards at the same time.

How did people manage that process back then? They used hieroglyphic records to distribute workforce and material resources. Laborers were divided into teams and given specific roles. Then, they’d create schedules based on seasonal patterns and performance capacities. Indeed, those were not “project management tools” as we see them now. However, they performed the same function – organized work to achieve a certain goal.

Managing the Construction of the Great Wall of China

The Great Wall’s construction back in the 7th century BCE is another impressive example of project management activities on an unprecedented scale. There, the administrators also needed to create and implement sophisticated approaches to coordinate millions of people involved in the construction process across miles.

What did they use? They made detailed records on bamboo strips and paper, where they tracked everything: labor resources, material requirements, and overall progress. Since the construction operation was large in scale, regional administrators used to send reports to the central administration. Doesn’t this resemble a modern project communication system? The Wall’s successful completion shows that modern project management techniques have quite ancient roots.

Visualizing Tasks with the Harmonogram

In 1896, a Polish engineer, Karol Adamiecki, put forward the idea of the Harmonogram. This instrument didn’t get much traction because Adamiecki published his work only in Polish and Russian. His chart, however, was the first example of a functional mechanism to visualize tasks as sliding strips and move them along the schedule to show changes.

The Harmonogram was a revolutionary suggestion. Project managers were given the idea on how to map out activities, determine their dependencies, and establish how different delays or deviations in one task could affect the other, or even the entire project. Adamiecki used this idea to improve efficiency in steel mills, but it gave an impulse to other projects and industries as well.

Scheduling with Gantt Charts

If you’ve managed any project in your life or planned something, you’ve probably used a Gantt chart. Henry Gantt created this chart around the 1910s. Even though it was quite similar to the Harmonogram, Gantt’s contribution was in simplifying the chart for everyday use.

Gantt charts display tasks as horizontal bars distributed below the timeline. Each bar is as long as its duration. so that anyone can establish what’s going on with a plan by giving it a quick look. Gantt charts proved to be efficient during World War I, when they helped coordinate large-scale military logistics operations. This success led to a gradual adoption of this tool in the business world.

What made Gantt charts so attractive in project management was the simplicity. Other scheduling methods involved complex and cumbersome calculations. Gantt charts managed to show you the bigger picture in a much easier way. Therefore, it didn’t matter whether you were an engineer or a mathematician; you could always apply the tool to your project.

Converting Project Management Into a Discipline with the American Association of Cost Engineers

The American Association of Cost Engineers (now AACE International) was founded in 1956. At that time, the organization initiated the idea that project management needed standardized practices. This can be considered a moment when the foundation for modern project management as a discipline was laid.

Following their ideas, AACE established standards for cost estimation, scheduling, and monitoring. Apart from that, they developed certification programs for further professional development of managers and released research publications that converted project management into a recognized profession. This professionalization drove demand for more sophisticated tools.

CPM and PERT

The late 1950s also brought two innovative techniques that dominate project management to this date. The first one, the Critical Path Method (or CPM), was introduced in 1957 by DuPont and Remington Rand. The second one, the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (or PERT), appeared in 1958 with the Polaris missile program in the U.S. Navy.

Both techniques are based on network diagrams that help you see task dependencies and estimate project timelines. While the CPM focuses on finding the critical path of tasks that defines the minimum viable project duration. PERT mix this estimation with probabilities, which helps you define likely completion with uncertain task durations.

A CPM analysis and a PERT for a long-term, large-scale project might involve thousands of calculations. Both techniques were quite complex to perform by hand, and computers solved the problem. This is how the first project management software appeared.

The First Digital Tools for PM

Microsoft Project

You’ll be surprised, but Microsoft Project wasn’t actually created by Microsoft. A company called Busicom designed the first version for DOS computers in 1984. In 1985, Microsoft bought it and released Microsoft Project 1.0. This was the strata of making professional project management software accessible to a vast group of businesses.

The original version of Microsoft Project was relatively basic compared to modern standards. However, you could already work with Henry Gantt’s charts, manage resources on a basic level, and keep an eye on costs. Having all of these capabilities on a PC at that time was revolutionary. Any business with a PC could use a professional scheduling tool and manage its projects much more efficiently.

Each subsequent version added more value to Microsoft Project. With time, users were able to do resource leveling, track multiple projects, and connect to other Microsoft products. Although Microsoft Project was a pioneer in introducing millions of people to professional project management, nowadays there a many alternatives to Microsoft Project that you can find here.

Artemis

At the very beginning, Microsoft targeted smaller businesses and specific departments. Artemis Systems, on the other hand, focused on bigger enterprise-level teams and projects. Artemis developed its project management software for mainframe computers in 1977, which significantly simplified the work of companies dealing with massive, complex projects.

Artemis was truly good at handling projects with intricate tasks and resources. The software allowed users to create and manage many projects simultaneously, track costs across them in a portfolio format, and generate reports on their performance. At that time, it was very popular among government agencies and big corporations that managed projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The enterprise-wide project management approach lets organizations see projects separately and within the portfolio to make more strategic decisions, considering all the variables across different areas. This bird’s-eye view was highly valuable for companies to manage projects within the organizational ecosystem, not as a bunch of unrelated tasks.

Tying It All Together

Regardless of whether it’s the Great Pyramid, the Chinese Wall, or a modern skyscraper, all of these constructions will share the same story of coordination, resourcefulness, and human ingenuity. On top of everything, project management is about people working toward a common goal and solving problems as they come.

As you can see, the core idea of any project management tool has always been the same: to find ways of organizing effort, managing time, and leading the progress toward an ultimate objective. That’s what people did centuries ago, and that’s what project managers still do while being equipped with faster tools and optimized techniques.