Introduction

PROJECT PLANNING has been around longer than any of us can remember; one might speculate that project planning began when groups of people first started living together, making multiple resources available to do the tasks needed to live. That first project manager might have been the one who ultimately became “chief” of the group by demonstrating good management skills in “getting the job done” while best utilizing existing resources and generally making sure that everything that needed to be done got done efficiently. Project management and project managers concern themselves with scheduling, budgeting, managing resources, and tracking and reporting progress.

As we’ve progressed, project management has become a discipline made up of a variety of tools and techniques that have become “standards” after being proven successful at helping project managers achieve their goals. Initially, tools were manual; project managers made cost calculations using calculators and drew charts and diagrams by hand that represented the way a project would unfold.

Enter the computer age, and tools like Microsoft Office Project 2007 became available to remove much of the mundane work, leaving project managers to focus on the aspects of the project that require decision-making: “If I had more time, what could I accomplish?” “If I had more people, how much time could I save? And at what cost?” “How can I monitor how things are going?” “How can I show management where we are and what we need to do next?” And so on.