PROJECTS AND TIME

A project can be thought of as the allocation of resources directed toward a specific objective following a planned, organized approach. Almost all companies and agencies carry out major work as projects. Projects are shaped by their environment in society, culture, time, regulation, and technology. Organizations carry out multiple projects at a time. Critical issues are how to manage resources across projects and non project work, how to ensure result quality and schedule and budget performance, and how to improve project management through lessons learned.

Successful projects management and projects are not new in the past 50 years. Throughout recorded history, vast projects have been undertaken across generations, many with great success. In this book, we will consider some of these the pyramids, the Coliseum of Rome, the Taj Mahal, and others. People undertaking projects 2000 years ago may not have had the technology we have today, but they often had political and economic stability and a society that took a long-range view of life and the world. Understanding how they accomplished these projects can provide insight for us today. We can take these lessons learned and apply them to modern projects.

Over the past 50 years the pace of technology innovation has accelerated. Pressure is on for more rapid results. People seek cause-effect relationships within weeks or months as opposed to years and even decades.