Making Things Happen

Chapter 1. A brief history of project management (and why you should care)

In many organizations, the person leading a project doesn’t have the job title project manager. That’s OK. Everyone manages projects in their daily work, whether they are working alone or leading a team. For the moment, these distinctions are not important. My intent is to capture what makes projects successful, and how the people who lead successful projects do it. These strategies don’t require specific hierarchies, job titles, or methods. So, if you work on a project and have at least some responsibility for its outcome, what follows will apply to you. And should your business card happen to say project manager on it, all the better.

This book is useful in three ways: as a collection of individual topic-focused essays, as a single extended narrative, and as a reference for common situations. Each chapter takes on a different high-level task, provides a basic framework, and offers tactics for successfully completing the task. However, in this opening chapter, I need to take a different approach: there are three broader topics that will make the rest of the book easier to follow, and I will present them now.

The first is a short history of projects and why we should learn from what others have done. The second is some background on the different flavors of project management, including some notes from my experience working at Microsoft. And the third is a look at the underlying challenges involved in project ...