عوامل فنی و سازمانی در ظهور مدیریت پروژه

This paper explores the fundamental question of why the practice and discipline of project management emerged during the 1940s through the 1960s in the United States. Although projects have been around for millennia, not until the middle of the 20th century in the U.S. military–industrial–academic complex did project management become formalized in institutional processes and as an academic discipline. The paper argues that technical complexity and novelty were the primary factors driving project management and its engineering counterpart systems engineering, as a new organizational form. Institutional factors such as the need for legal separation between government and industry created important secondary effects that drove the particular forms in which project management evolved. This paper uses examples from large scale, complex projects of the 1940s through 1960s in the aerospace and computing industries to tease out the fundamental technical and institutional factors that led to the emergence of project management in these two key American industries during this period.

Recent renewed interest in history among project management (PM) researchers has led to calls to: move beyond the single case study method to address methods and ideas between and across projects (Packendorff, 1995), to understand the evolution of project methods over time and their changing contexts (Engwall, 2003), to understand the many kinds of projects and their behaviors, functions, and measures of success (Söderlund, 2004), call attention to early PM's flexibility and propensity to experiment (Lenfle and Loch, 2010). All of these issues, along with the seven schools of PM research identified in Söderlund (2011) require deeper historical understanding than can be gained by normative assessments of single projects. Viewed historically, PM is a major step in the evolution of how managers gained (or attempted to gain) control of organizations, technologies, and workers. Management as a career path developed with the creation of railways in the 19th century in the United States (Chandler, 1977). To manage large-scale, distributed railroad organizations, managers borrowed Army methods in developing “systematic management”, which they used to control schedules, finances, and cargo. Upper management used systematic management to control mid-level managers and office workers (Yates, 1989). At the turn of the century, Frederick Winslow Taylor developed “scientific management”, which enabled managers, allied with engineers, to control factory operations and workers (Kanigel, 1998). These methods made the Ford assembly line possible (Nelson, 1992). Taylorist methods morphed into the Quality Control movement in Japan and then into Total Quality Management, which propagated around the world after World War II (Tsutsui, 1998). Project Management came into being in the 1940s–60s in the United States (U.S.) military–industrial–academic complex (Morris, 1994), in conjunction with operations research and systems engineering (Johnson, 1997). Within this context, PM became the primary managerial technique to develop complex new products and technologies. We will see that project management formed as a response to difficult technical and organizational problems with complex military projects. This paper will demonstrate that project management is an evolving technique of organizational problem solving, which was created in a specific time, place, and culture to resolve specific problems.

PM and its technical counterparts systems analysis and systems engineering were primarily created to resolve the combined issues of technical complexity and novelty. If a technology is complex, but not new, then organizations will have already adapted to it. Conversely, if a technology is novel but simple, then individuals and organizations will simply perform the tasks. In either of these cases individually, there is little reason to create new organizations or processes. However, in combination the technologies are too complex to easily understand, and being novel, there is little historical experience. These technical product uncertainties translated into cost and schedule uncertainties. Faced with cost and schedule overruns, managers had to find a way to manage technology development, which could not be done unless they found a way to address the large knowledge uncertainties. Why did the problem of new complex systems lead to project management? Revisiting the twin issues of novelty and complexity, if either occurs or neither occur, there is no reason to make changes to address technologies. However, when both occur together, classical management methods of systematic and scientific management do not work because these assume that managers can master workers' knowledge. For complex new knowledge, techniques of “knowledge appropriation” did not work because the new knowledge did not yet exist. Once scientists and engineers standardized that knowledge into production lines or organizational procedures, classical management methods could and did resume. In the interim, new methods to organize knowledge creation were needed; this was project management. As shown in Table 1, several similar but somewhat different models of PM evolved, each of which acquired and managed technical knowledge through different institutional means. Wernher von Braun developed an “in-house” model on the V-2 project and propagated it to the U.S. Army, in which military personnel developed, integrated, and tested the system with maximum delegation of responsibility to a highly competent, internal, “organic” team. The Army also utilized an academic model with Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a branch of the California Institute of Technology developing, managing, and controlling the Corporal and Sergeant missile projects on the Army's behalf. The Navy's Polaris project assigned managerial control to military officers in the Special Projects Office, acquiring knowledge by induced contractor competition. However, the contractors held the technical expertise. The Air Force used an academic model for its SAGE air defense project, with MIT's Lincoln Laboratory managing, integrating and controlling the project, and bringing in the non-profit RAND Corporation to develop the software. However, MIT and RAND recoiled from large-scale development as it distorted their primary mission of performing research. Both spun out new non-profit corporations to perform these duties: MITRE and System Development Corporation—System Development Corporation later became Unisys.Schriever's Air Force organization brought highly-educated professionals into a profit-making corporation and integrated it directly into the government structure. This model failed due to the American bias to separate private from public, government functions. Technical direction, systems engineering, and PM provided insider knowledge, which Ramo-Wooldridge exploited to build its business into the aerospace giant TRW. Schriever was forced to separate these functions from TRW into the non-profit, The Aerospace Corporation. California Institute of Technology and MIT were able to perform these functions without so many political difficulties because they were non-profit academic organizations that did not threaten industry. This narrative focuses on military and government projects in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, because this is where the combination of extraordinarily large, novel, and complex high-technology projects evoked new technical and organizational solutions. While project management as an identifiable, recognizable profession and discipline is ubiquitous today, it was not always so. It was not recognized as a profession and discipline until such time as it was identifiable as significantly different from standard operations management practices. This recognition began in a specific time—the late 1940s through the early 1960s, in a specific place—the United States, with a specific set of institutional actors—the military and its associated industrial and academic contractors, and in a specific context—the complex aviation, space, and air & space defense projects of the early Cold War in the competition with the Soviet Union. Project management is a specific institutional and organizational response to the technical and organizational problems of novel, complex “high technology” developed in specific projects. That is, it is the managerial method dedicated to the management of knowledge creation. This form of organization formed in the American proto-aerospace industry and the proto-computer industry, because these were the two most complex technologies of their day, and both were integral to the defense problems and systems of the early Cold War. While this paper describes several aerospace projects and only one computer-centric project, this computer project was one of the most important computer projects of its era, significantly influencing later developments, particularly in software and real-time computing, as is made clear in histories of computing (Cerruzzi, 1998) and of software (Campbell-Kelly, 2003). The government, industry, and academia were all central to the creation of project management, and its affiliated methods, systems engineering and operations research. Project management primarily addressed the organizational issues, systems engineering the technical coordination, and operations research—which became systems analysis, the technical feasibility of projects. From its origin point in the military and its associated aviation and proto-computer industry, it spread to other branches of government and other industries in the United States, and from there to Europe and then around the world. There was relatively little influence from outside of the United States on these developments, aside from von Braun's team imported from Germany, for several reasons. These included military secrecy, the fact that the U.S. was often far in the lead in these technological developments, and put far more resources into them than other nations. Similarly, there were relatively few influences from other industries in the United States on the development of project management, because these other industries did not face the same scale of technological uncertainty, pressures for rapid development, and sheer scale as the aerospace and defense computing industries. It is important to note that the style and type of management that evolved in the aerospace and to a slightly lesser degree computing industries is almost completely derived from the specific technical and organizational problems of military weapon system projects. Aerospace and computing companies explicitly mirrored the organizations and processes of the military and government organizations they worked with, to aid winning contracts and to work collaboratively with the government. These forms of organization and management then persisted even when not working directly for the government, to become the dominant methods in those industries. The story of project management's origins show that it is a technique developed as a response to a very specific set of problems, in a very specific cultural and historical context. Returning to the issues initially described in this paper regarding the current state of research in project management, this narrative helps to demonstrate that purely normative analyses of specific projects have severe limitations. There is no single best method of project management valid across different industries, organizations, or nations. Project management evolved at one time and place to solve one specific set of problems, and it has continued to evolve since, across many projects, cultures and problems. And it will continue to do so.