PMWT Viewpoints - August 2006
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Some Origins of Modern Project Management -
A Personal History
by Dr. Martin Barnes
HOW IT ALL BEGAN - My first contact with ‘critical path’ (CPM) was in early 1962 when I was working on a dam construction project in the north of England. In early 1963 I moved to be chief planning engineer on building the motorway (freeway) going West out of London including the link to Heathrow airport. Nobody has refuted my claim that this was the first application of CPM to a civil engineering project in the UK! I produced huge arrow networks and wrote up everything on data sheets for punched cards. Using the Mauchly Associates program, I drove into London once a month to use the Lloyds IBM computer (few businesses had their own in those days) to update the programmes and then drove back again with a thick wodge of printer output. Everybody thought it was terribly clever.
By 1968, after a spell in Canada, I was at Manchester University doing a PhD researching how civil engineering projects could be better controlled from the money and time aspects. Given my background in planning, I was thinking about how time control could be integrated with cost control. This was the main plank of my research. I designed a computer program which did integrate cost, time and resources and could show the effect of decisions about the work and how to do it on both cost and time simultaneously. It was a Fortran programme, still with punched card input, and needing a very big mainframe to chop. By the way, it used precedence diagrams, not arrow diagrams – a big controversy at the time. I later produced, with John Gillespie a Cobol version called Project Cost Model (PCM) which we marketed to the industries from 1971.
I designed a course called ‘Time and Money in Contract Control’ in 1969 which showed people how to control cost and time in an integrated way. Notice that if the word ‘project’ had been in general use at that time – I would have used it instead of ‘contract’. It was on one of these courses that I pointed out that in managing a ‘contract’, you did not just have to manage the cost and the time, you had to manage the delivery of what was specified as well. I sketched a diagram to make the point – a triangle with time, cost and quality at the corners. On the overhead projector, I moved a coin around the triangle to show how the three tensions competed, etc. This concept really caught on and, as far as I know, it was the first time anybody had set down that managing what we now call a project was not just time control, it was control of cost and outcome as well. I think that this was a very significant step in the establishment of modern project management and my triangle diagram came to be used all over the world.
In 1972 I went to the Internet (now IPMA) congress in Stockholm and gave a paper about integrating cost and time control featuring my software. At that time and at that congress, everybody was talking about network analysis, nothing else. It was the first technique of modern project management and it’s dominance held back broadening the skill for a few years.
Very soon after the Stockholm congress, we set up Internet (UK). This body developed into the Association for Project management (APM). It has been a key part of my life to be active in APM and IPMA ever since.
Dr. Martin Barnes Martin Barnes has been working in project management for the last 30 years. The management consulting business which he founded merged with what is now PricewaterhouseCoopers in 1985. Since 1996 he has been an independent consultant. He is also Executive Director of the Major Projects Association, the prestigious association for businesses and governments involved in major projects based in the University of Oxford, UK. http://www.majorprojects.org
Martin has advised many of the largest businesses and other undertakings on project management, both in the U.K. and elsewhere. He specialises in the organisational and human aspects of project management, contracts and risk management. His recent work has included risk management in the decommissioning of nuclear installations and constructing major chemical plants, introduction of project management into the financial sector and project management of a major racecourse development.
Martin has been responsible for a number of developments in project management technique now widely used. He invented what is now often called the 'classic' project management triangle (Cost - Time - Quality) in 1969. More recently he conceived the New Engineering Contract and headed the team which designed and developed it. It is the only standard contract system designed to stimulate application of modern, collaborative project management techniques around all the organisations involved in a project.
Martin Barnes is a former Chairman of the Association for Project Management in the UK and of the Council of the International Project Management Association (IPMA). His many contributions to IPMA international congresses over the years have been memorable and he has lectured on project management all over the world. His BBC television programme on PM is widely used to introduce the topic into new areas.
Martin Barnes can be reached at cornbrash@aol.com
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