project management

Technique for matching available resources (time, money, and people) against business project aims (early completion date, final cost, and so on). The technique originated in the shipbuilding industry during World War I, when Henry Laurence Gantt developed what is now known as the Gantt chart, a bar chart deploying use of resources over time.

In the 1950s, the US companies Du Pont and Remington Rand developed the critical-path method, which arrives at the combination of resource allocation that determines a project's end date. This was subsequently incorporated by the US Navy into its PERT (program evaluation and review technique), which displays graphically which processes are dependent on others. The Project Management Institute, established in 1969, is the global advocate for the project management profession with more than 260,000 members in over 170 countries.