The Evolution of Project Management

The more I watch conversations around project management unfold, and the more my conversations bring me into contact with practitioners with deeper experiences than me, the more convinced I am that PMI, in conjunction with IPMA, APM, etc., needs to launch (and fund) an initiative to capture, document, and explain the evolution of ‘professional project management’ over the last 10 decades or so. 

Project management is a discipline and practice, much like medicine and science. And it evolves and changes over time as we learn new things, as technology and capabilities change, as needs and goals change. It adapts to the ‘current’.

But many of the arguments we see are stuck in the past and using a ‘version’ of project management that doesn’t allow it to change, evolve, or grow. Things like ‘Waterfall is out-dated’, or ‘gates/phases are wrong’, ‘the Triple Constraints are a too rigid’, or Agile is ‘different’ than project management.

None of these are true, but more importantly, none of these recognize ‘why’ some of these were necessary steps along the path to where we are now. For example, many point to Royce’s paper and the ‘Waterfall’ and gate model as bad practice, not recognizing that at the time gates were ‘necessary’ because computer time was costly, so the rapid testing/prototyping we see today wasn’t possible. But technology changed and so did how we could approach projects. 

Similarly, the Triple Constraints are vilified as ‘success criteria’ for projects, yet the model was never intended to be a ‘success model’. It was an evolutionary step, that started with contracts being managed for time and cost only, until Dr. Barnes recognized that ‘scope’ (quality & performance) was also a key considerations. Today we’ve evolved to understand that ‘value’ is a better construct.

These changes, and the understanding of them, don’t make Waterfall or the Triples Constraints *wrong*, they make them *steps* to where we are now. Eventually ‘Agile’ will be seen as out-dated and a ‘step’ to wherever we end up with upcoming impact of AI.

No one argues that ‘astronomy’ means heliocentric or geocentric, and that modern astronomy is ‘different’, we recognize that those views, while wrong, were necessary steps to how we *better* understand ‘astronomy’. No one suggests that ‘medicine’ means using leeches anymore, we recognize that our understanding of healthcare has evolved.

But understanding that history is critical to knowing how we got where we are, and being able to see where we might go.

And I think as a service to the pm community the major pm associations have a responsibility to not just capture this, but to educate with it. 

Originally published on LinkedIn