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Project management is the discipline of organizing and managing resources in such a way that these resources deliver all the work required to complete a project within defined scope, time, and cost constraints (Berry 2006). Almost any human activity that involves carrying out a non-repetitive task can be a project. But there is a big difference between carrying out a very simple project involving one or two people and one involving a complex mix of people, organizations and tasks.
The art of planning for the future has always been a human trait (Berkun 2005). In essence a project can be captured on paper with a few simple elements: a start date, an end date, the tasks that have to be carried out and when they should be finished, and some idea of the resources that will be needed during the course of the project. When the plan starts to involve different things happening at different times, some of which are dependent on each other, plus resources required at different times and in different quantities and perhaps working at different rates, the paper plan could start to cover a vast area and be unreadable.
This was a problem facing the US Navy in the development of the Polaris missile system. There were so many aspects to the project that a new technique had to be invented to cope with it, the PERT technique (Lewis 2002). This and later developments led to mathematical techniques that can be used to find the critical path through a series of planned tasks that interconnect during the life of a project. You could begin the story of modern project management from this time. But that would be unfair as project management is not only about planning but also about human attributes like leadership and ...