Organizations and industries tend to embrace project management when they either stand to gain significantly by doing so or to lose by not doing so. Many historical projects left a visible legacy behind them, but those in prior centuries left little in the way of a project record. In the twentieth cen-tury, the Navy and NASA projects mentioned earlier could not have been achieved without project management. The construction industry and other government contractors that won major contracts began to embrace the same project management practices as their sponsoring government agency did. Other industries, such as the pharmaceutical industry, made significant gains in quality and mitigated complexity by using project management. The examples could go on and on.
During this past decade, most large organizations were integrating com-puter technology into their strategic business systems. This evolving technol-ogy was generating hundreds of projects. The shift to an organizational context in project management therefore coincided with an influx of professionals from information systems, information technology, and information manage-ment functions into project management. They joined the professional associ-ations in record numbers. Previously, professional practitioners were from the construction industry, streamlined as it was by project management methods and tools from government. The motto of the Project Management Institute’s marketing thrust during the early nineties was “Associate with Winners.”
In contrast, information systems and information technology projects were getting media coverage citing 200 percent budget overruns and sched-ule delays.7
As these groups shifted their attention from software engineering to project management, they brought the attention of management with them as well. All were aware of the wasted resources and opportunity costs of not managing projects well. The idea resonated with senior management that
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projects simply were not “nonstandard operations” but rather a core busi-ness process for implementing strategic initiatives. Senior management was ready to begin managing projects more systematically. Project management became the topic for executive forums, and some executive groups reviewed all projects biannually to determine the best use of the organiza-tion’s strategic resources (see Chapter 12).
The response of the marketplace to recognition of the project manag-er and the project management function caused interest to skyrocket. Membership in the professional association grew quickly, swelling from just under 10,000 members in 1992 to 100,000 by 2002 and 150,000 by 2005.8 Project management was the subject of articles in business newspa-pers and corporate journals. Research began to show that organizations with mature project management environments derive more value from project management than those beginning to implement it.9
The government had funded a means by which software engineering professionals could judge the maturity of their software development envi-ronments,10 but no parallel instrument existed for assessing the maturity of project management environments. By 1999, professionals from all over the world were collaborating to create an “Organization Project Management Maturity Model” (OPM3™), released in 2003 (PMI).11 Various maturity models were developed in leading business schools (e.g., Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley), as well as by vendors, and these models were applied to products serving the maturing project management marketplace (see Chapter 12). Like people weaving different corners of the same tapestry,12 the detail and richness of the profession are emerging from the combined cooperative efforts of many professional bodies and are being advanced by their common application of standards and training in the agreed-on and “generally accepted” project management process. While there is still a good deal of work to be done before these separate fronts merge into one picture, the movement is steady and positive toward that end.
Recognition of “professionalism” in project management remains uneven across industries. In 1986, at the same time the corporate sector was beginning to implement project management fundamentals, the government sector already was moving forward to implement earned-value measurement and performance management. Information systems (IS) and information technology (IT) were expanding into strategic business initiatives, but they were too new to have both product development methodology and project management methodology in place (see Chapter 12). It will be a while before these different parts of the marketplace all speak the same language.
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