Tuesday, February 23, 2021

40 Years!

On May 1, 1981, I walked out the door of ITT Mackay Marine, in Raleigh, NC, and began a new career teaching seminars. For most of the next 40 years I taught project management and related topics, and had 16 books published by McGraw-Hill and AMACOM. My first book, Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control, 5th Edition has been in print since 1991 so for 30 years it has been circulating. It has been translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese. 

The 15 years before 1981 gave me my real-world experience in managing projects. So altogether I've been involved in the discipline for 55 years. That's 70% of my life!

What has changed about the discipline? Really, not very much. Almost all of the tools existed in the 60s, because they were invented in manufacturing, and we just adopted them to manage the work of projects. This includes the Work Breakdown Structure, Critical Path Scheduling, and Earned Value Analysis. Even FMEA, which is great for risk management, was developed in the 1950s (Failure Mode Effects Analysis).

There are three significant changes that I have seen. Scheduling software that runs on personal computers probably tops the list. The first scheduling I did involved card punch input to a mainframe that was a time-share so it may have taken 24 hours to get turnaround, and if you made a typo, you got a syntax error which could take hours to find.

Secondly, the adoption of project management by software developers, engineers, and other technologists took place in the 1980s. Before that, mostly construction projects applied scheduling to their jobs. 

The other change that I consider significant is that there are now an almost equal number of women in project management positions as men. Of course, this is an across-the-board change. In 1959 when I entered engineering school at NC State University, there were around 5000 total students, of which only about 50 were women. And my seminars seldom had more than a single woman in attendance until about 2000, when the numbers began to equalize--a change that I have been delighted to see, because, quite frankly, project management is a people job and women tend to be more skilled at leading people than men (perhaps that's a biased view, but it is based on my experience with more than 60,000 students).

I quit updating my books following the 5th edition of Project Planning, Scheduling, and Control in 2011. The reason is that the discipline is pretty mature and I saw no benefit to revising a book to just say the same thing in different words. I could have added chapters on Agile, but I don't believe in writing about something I've never actually done, and I wanted my books to be based on hands-on experience.

Well, that's a walk down memory lane. The only thing I want to add is something that Alan Mulally told me, when he was President of Boeing Commercial Airplanes. He said that they didn't differentiate very much between project management and general management. What he meant by that is that the methods for managing projects are perfectly adaptable to managing an entire company, and in my opinion, we could benefit tremendously if we could get every C-Suite executive to follow that suggestion.

That's all folks. Remember, project managers do it on time.