Monthly Archives: July 2018

Our peer-reviewed paper, ‘The origins of schedule management: the concepts used in planning, allocating, visualizing and managing time in a project’ has recently published in the ‘Frontiers of Engineering Management’ at: http://journal.hep.com.cn/fem/EN/2095-7513/current.shtml

This paper brings together a number of published articles and other research we’ve undertaken in the last decade or so to present a coherent view of the evolution of project scheduling in a format that can be used by other Academics.  It is also aimed at correcting many of the commonly held misconceptions around this topic.

The concepts used for project schedule management have very deep roots; getting the right people in the right place at the right time to accomplish an objective has been a major organizational challenge for at least 3000 years! In ancient times this process seems to have been based on the scheme of arrangements being contained in the leader’s mind and instructions communicated verbally. Modern approaches to solving the twin challenges of first thinking through the ‘plan’ and then communicating the plan to the people who need to do ‘the right work, at the right time, in the right place’ use sophisticated graphics, charts, diagrams, and computations, but the problem and challenges are the same.

This paper traces the development of the concepts most project managers take for granted including bar charts and critical path schedules from their origins (which are far earlier than most people think) through to the modern day. The first section of the paper looks at the development of concepts that allow the visualization of time and other data. The second looks at the shift from static representations to dynamic modelling through the emergence of computers, dynamic calculations and integrated data from the 1950s to the present time.

You can download an augmented version of the paper from: https://mosaicprojects.com.au/PDF_Papers/P202_The_Origins_of_Schedule_Management.pdf