Chapter 2. Project Management Evolution

“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”

Michael Redgrave (Narrator)[1]

[1] The Go-Between, Joseph Losey, Director; Harold Pinter, Writer, 1970.

The engineering and, more significantly, the IT professions have heavily influenced the evolution of business project management.

As a new profession, information systems looked to other professions for guidance and for models to assist in formalizing and establishing best practices. Given the dominance of hardware engineering and research in the early days of computing, it is not surprising that many of the initial models for development and management were drawn from engineering and construction.

The classic product and system development ...

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