![]() These project managers were great at the work they do, but their approach to how they track their projects and report on status rarely matched that of their peers. In the early 2000s, we saw an ever-increasing number of project managers in all areas of business. To this day, anyone with the title Project Manager will have likely read, has been trained in, or has knowledge of the PMBOK. The PMBOK is a small book that covers all the primary topics and goes from there to highlight other areas of study. Put simply it laid out the core elements of project management, and standards of practice project managers should follow. To provide standardized testing and create a common lexicon, the Project Management Institute (or PMI) released a book called A User’s Manual to the PMBOK Guide. I took night courses at Boston University to receive my project management certification and was promoted with the title of Sr. However, it was obvious that my role was focused on building plans, managing teams, reporting on status, and all the things a project manager might do. For example, when I was working in IT at a refinery just outside Boston, my formal title was IT Analyst. In the late 80s and early 90s, the formal title of project manager became extremely popular in almost every industry. However, as you can imagine, managing a project that is more than a few months in length could cause a significant load to maintain the project, so you typically need a project manager or project scheduler to keep it up to date. If along the way, there is new scope, you define it and place it into the work breakdown structure where appropriate. Building a house is a common example because it would not be prudent to construct the roof before the frame, or build anything without first acquiring the land or getting approved engineering diagrams.Ĭontrary to popular belief, the waterfall method is not designed to be so set in stone that you cannot make changes. Some projects benefit greatly from this waterfall approach, such as construction, engineering, and highly regulated projects. What you end up with is a chart that looks like the following image, that sort of looks like a waterfall. You define this work from beginning to end (top to bottom) and define when the work occurs from start to finish (left to right). The idea is to lay out all the work, milestones, and deliverables required for a project, broken out into what we call work breakdown structures. The reason you hear people refer to a Gantt chart as the “waterfall” method is because of the nature of the chart itself. Around 1910, Henry Gantt popularized the chart, and we all know it today as the Gantt chart. The “waterfall” methodĪround 1896, Karol Adamiecki created what we refer to as the harmonogram/harmonograf. Let’s unpack that statement with a look into the rearview mirror to see how project management and agile found their way into our corporate lexicon. It would be wrong to say that project management and agile are two different and competing ideologies. In this first part, I level-set with the history of project management and agile so you can see where we have come from and where we are going in the project management industry._ This article is part 1 of a 5-part series that introduces agile concepts.
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