I’ve spent many years as a project manager/program manager and know many other great leaders of the Mac II, System 7, Windows 95, and they all the talent to rally the teams to work together like Gung Ho is used. Being a project manager has grown into certified profession with its vocabulary embraced by consultants to manage complex projects.
Professional project managers almost all know that the big start was in the creation of PERT for the Polaris missile program.
““PERT” was developed primarily to simplify the planning and scheduling of large and complex projects. It was developed for the U.S. Navy Special Projects Office in 1957 to support the U.S. Navy’s Polaris nuclear submarine project.[2] It found applications all over industry. An early example was it was used for the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble which applied PERT from 1965 until the opening of the 1968 Games.[3] This project model was the first of its kind, a revival for scientific management, founded by Frederick Taylor (Taylorism) and later refined by Henry Ford (Fordism). DuPont’s critical path method was invented at roughly the same time as PERT.”
Chatting with a close friend on how project managers should support a project and whether the person should come from corporate on the field. Thinking about this issue for a week I came back and said well the main problem you have with project managers is the way they are wired to work these days is their #1 goal is their own survival and create processes that protect them and when things go wrong it is not their fault, but others. We laughed.
To back up my point I decided to go to the source and bought a used copy of “The Polaris System Development” book by Harvey Sapolsky. Here is one paragraph where Harvey says there was no ROI for PERT as an analysis would shatter the myth that PERT was perfect in its planning.
“The Special Projects Office never has attempted to measure the effectiveness of PERT; the reputational cost of a negative finding would prove too costly for the organization to bear. Moreover, such a study would be somewhat pointless whatever its results since PERT-type systems are now a Department of Defense requirement on FBM and other weapon development contracts. Yet subjective evaluations of PERT do exist in the Special Projects Office, the birthplace of the PERT system. As one senior officer stated, “We would seek an immediate exemp- tion for the OSD requirement but it isn’t worth the fight. They apparently believe in it and they pay for it.””
The best part about doing this research is I have had numerous e-mail conversations with Harvey Sapolsky and understand his research so much better and what was the true skills developed during the Polaris Project to ship a game changing technology that has changed nuclear weaponry.