Ithuta JV

Projects, loosely defined as single endeavours that utilise resources with definite starting and finishing dates, have been undertaken for thousands of years. Emerging technologies of the time have been used to create unique and wonderful outcomes, structures like the pyramids, bridges and various machines. People have also undertaken projects to embark on great expeditions and journeys like circumnavigating the world, discovering new lands and conquering distant and challenging places. These were all forms of projects that required initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing.

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In its modern form, project management principles became entrenched as a discipline and methodology around the middle of the 20th century, when businesses and organisations began to see the benefit of organizing work around projects and to understand the need to integrate and communicate work across multiple departments, professions and functions. During and after World War 2, the greater complexities of projects and scarcer resources demanded more rigid adherence to project management principles and it was at this time that complex network diagrams and scheduling techniques, many of which began using the concept of ‘critical path’, were introduced. These provided managers greater control over intricately manufactured engineering structures and extremely complex projects, like military weapon systems with a huge variety of tasks and numerous interactions and inter-dependencies. Modern project management has built upon these developments by the creation of software that provide powerful and easy ways to plan and control project costs and schedules.

In recent years, mainly because of the high complexity of many high value and strategic projects, as well as the need to complete projects as quickly as possible to exploit markets or for strategic reasons, project management is taking a ‘systems thinking’ approach. Project management is becoming more flexible and adaptive where the project life cycle is viewed more as a system, where the interdependencies and relationships of the components of the project life cycle are allowed to develop simultaneously rather than adopting the rigid sequential nature of more traditional project management.