Project management (PM), as such, is not a new concept. Egyptians and Indians have been using the principles of PM for centuries. The first known use of techniques and tools in the modern world dates back to the 1950s when the US Navy applied PM for Project Polaris. Soon, NASA adopted it. Large engineering and construction firms followed suit in the late 1970s. The advent of software engineering firms in the 1980s was on the backbone of PM principles, which continues to date. These companies adopted CPM/PERT charts and Gantt charts and combined them with PM tools to manage their companies. Software engineering companies primarily involve human resources and scheduling would be one of the key tools of PM. It is perhaps for this reason that project management was misconstrued to be a resource planning tool and executives did not pay attention to it. In fact, PM is actually an excellent high order management tool.
There are many variations of tools but the most popular and widely followed is PMBOK®(The Project Management Body of Knowledge) by the Project Management Institute of Pennsylvania; I am privileged to have undergone the training about 15 years ago. Being a chartered accountant entrusted to head an MNC’s PM vertical, I thought it necessary to get some knowledge on what I lacked in engineering. To my surprise and great learning, my batch largely consisted of software experts, a few from pharma companies, a couple from engineering firms, one from a steel manufacturing giant and another from an electric company, with me being the only one from a construction management company. For me, it was more about learning a new leadership model and tools. I have successfully applied the principles and used the tools learnt in my stint with Knight Frank.
So,let’s start with a question: What is a ‘Project’ and how is it different from ‘Operations’?
