It is important to understand that in today's business world, project management is not about just managing a new building or managing a civil engineering project. There have been several trends that have made companies concentrate more on project management concepts.

• Today the focus is on high quality, quick to market and first class customer satisfaction. During the last fifteen years there has been a shift from mass production to custom production of goods and services. To respond to this managers have turned to project management to ensure highly responsive management style. Companies are changing from heirarchical management to project management. Organisational charts are changing from vertical structures to team-centred structures.


• Jobs that do the same tasks every day are disappearing. Middle management are also disappearing. The new focus is on projects and teams assigned to specific tasks or problems. Teams might be set up to launch a new project or re-engineer a process. Projects are conceived, staffed up, implemented and then shut down.


• Companies offer less job security than before. They outsource non-core activities. People define themselves less by the companies they work for, more by their profession. Pay is determined by skill level and the marketability of the person's services than by management hierarchy.

Richman (2002)

The 1990s also saw the increasing deregulation, reduced tariff barriers and, more importantly, expanding IT facilities and communications through the internet.

During the 1960s and 1970s the manual tasks and concepts that predominate throughout project management (network diagrams, bar charts etc.) were computerised using mainframe computers. However it was the introduction of the PC that led to the expansion and spread of project management software.

As Burke notes:

The introduction of the PC in the late seventies (Apple 11) and the IBM PC (1981) in the early eighties with accompanying business software encouraged the growth of project planning software and the use of project management techniques. Burke (2003)

Excerpts from The University of Sunderland BA (Honours) Business Management, courtesy Resource Development International (RDI) Jamaica. www.rdijamaica.com