Why Project Management?
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s names will forever symbolize one of humanity’s greatest achievements: putting a human on the moon. Yet, withover 400,000 NASA employees and 20,000 companies and universities working together on the Apollo missions, the people who managed the project may have been the most crucial to actually landing on the moon.
In 1961, President Kennedy committed to putting a man on the moon—and bring him back safely—within a decade, when NASA had only ever sent an astronaut to space for 15 minutes. Such a staggeringly complex project necessitated an incredible amount of resources, teamwork, innovation, and planning. Do each part at random, and it’d never get finished.
As recounted in NASA’s “Managing the Moon Program,” the problem wasn’t so much what to do, as much as it was how to do so much in so little time. “We knew what had to be done,” recounted Dr. Max Faget, head of engineering at Johnson Space Center. “How to do it in 10 years was never addressed before the announcement was made. But quite simply, we considered a program of a number of phases.”
What mattered, then, was accelerating each phase and making sure the various teams and companies working on each part of the project could collaborate effectively, delivering finished work in a timely manner. That task fell to Dr. George E. Muller, who managed every part of the Apollo project from the White House to the smallest supplier. To ensure all phases worked perfectly, he broke each down into five areas: Program Control, System Engineering, Testing, Reliability & Quality, and Flight Operations.
This five box system—called GEM boxes after Muller’s initials—was designed “to focus, early on in the program, on the fact that you were going to test things, and you ought to design so you can test them,” said Muller. Program Control described what was needed, managed the budget and requirements, and specified how each piece worked together. System Engineering designed new items, Testing made sure it worked, Reliability & Quality made sure each item was up-to-spec, and Flight Operations ensured it’d work in flight.
“When people were first confronted with your approach to things, like all-up testing and management of the systems level, there was an initial skepticism that that was the right way to do business,” recalled Dr. John Logsdon of the feelings when Muller’s project management plan was introduced. But it proved itself out.
As Dr. Muller said, “the amount of time it took to convince people that that was, in fact, a good thing to do, and, in my view at least, was necessary in order to provide the kinds of communications that were required in that complex a program in order to be sure that all those interfaces worked.”
Muller’s project management system was a resounding success. NASA put the first humans on the moon and brought them back to earth safely in less than a decade of Kennedy’s announcement. That was only possible by breaking down the enormous project into manageable, repeatable steps, ones that guaranteed success even when working with so many individuals and companies. It was a project management system—and teamwork—that won the space race.
A Quick History of Project Management
Project Management wasn’t new to NASA and Dr. Muller; Egypt’s pyramids and the Great Wall of China showcase the results of project management from bygone millennia. There’s little documentation of early project management methods, and today’s project management methods are descended from ideas from the past century.
The most obvious way to break a project down is by its phases or tasks. Take cooking a recipe, for instance: you purchase the ingredients, combine them correctly, cook them, and then serve your finished meal. A simple project management method would be to list each step and check it off as it’s completed—a simple to-do list, perhaps, would suffice.
Maybe you’d want to cook multiple dishes—perhaps you’ll make a salad (with just three steps since it doesn’t need to be cooked) and a dessert (with just one step since it’s pre-made). You’ll need to serve each dish on time, and still make sure everything gets done. Suddenly, you’ll need a more powerful project management system, one that lines up the time needed for each task with the time each task is supposed to be completed.
That’s where one of the first modern project management tools—the Gantt chart—comes into play.
Invented independently by Korol Adamiecki and Henry Gantt in the early 20th century, the Gantt chart lists a project schedule based on start and finish dates. You list how long a task takes, and if any other tasks have to be completed before that task can start—for instance, you can’t serve your meal before you’ve cooked it. You can then calculate the “critical path” of the activities that must be completed by certain dates, and estimate how long the total project will take.
Traditional project management looks a lot like this dinner project, only with far more tasks and more stringent deadlines and carefully planned resources. A project with tight deadlines might use a Gantt chart to decide when to start tasks; a project where resources are more constrained (say, a dinner project where two different dishes need the oven at different temperatures) might use an event chain diagram—much the same as a Gantt chart, but focused on the usage of resources other than time.
Some projects need more or less structure than traditional project management gives you. If you’re publishing a series of articles on a blog, specific deadlines might not be as helpful as a process where you plan each article, write the first draft, get early edits and feedback, finish the article, proofread it, and then publish it. Instead of managing time or resources, you’ll manage process, running every task through the same checklist or workflow.
It’s for projects like these that Agile project management and its many offshoots—Lean, Kanban, and more—have been developed, to help you make a process to produce consistent work. Some projects need to add more dates and resource allocation back into an agile workflow, so more advanced techniques like Six Sigma and Scrum have been developed as well.
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