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have thus come to the conclusion
that the answer lies rather in the
establishment of more commonly
understood principles in order to
cultivate reasoning and judgement
for each new circumstance.
The Past
Based on a review of academic research
taken from the 1950’s. R.P. Oisen defined
project management as “the application
of a collection of tools and techniques
(such as CPM and matrix organisation)
to direct the use of diverse resources toward the accomplishment of a unique,
complex, one-time task within time,
cost and quality constraints” (Oisen,
1971). The definition encapsulates the
practice of project management as it
was evolving at that time in military and
space systems development. Both were
highly controlled environments and not
generally exposed to the vagaries of
market, resource instability or any other
external factors. The focus was narrow: a
“one-time” task to which a “collection” of
tools and techniques (taken mostly from
industrial manufacturing) were brought
to bear and evaluated only in terms of
internal measures, which today are generally regarded as dynamically balanced
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constraints and not measures of project
success. The focus of academic research
at the time was placed on operational
research and quantitative methods of
management (Cicmil, 2006), a system
developed within the so-called “Modern
Era” and characterised by the need to
improve human existence through
technology using the tools of rational
management (Van Gelder, 1991). The
1950’s is generally regarded as the time
at which project management arose
as a distinct management discipline
based on an engineering model (David
I. Cleland, 2006) Twenty years later in
the 1970’s, the ideas of post-modernism, which started in the 1930’s, was
now starting to take hold in the postwar generation. This generation had
started to reject the belief in man’s inevitable progress though the conquest
of nature. The optimism of the modern
era (i.e. the discovery of truth through
rationality and logical argumentation)
gave way to a growing pessimism that
the world was not becoming a better
place to live in. There was already proof
of an alarming depletion of natural
resources, evidence of the first overt
signs of global warming and noticeable effects from an exponential rise in
PM Africa Magazine — september 2014
population growth. These factors made
many people realise that the world’s
ecological system is fragile and that the
survival of mankind was under threat.
The Enlightenment model of the conquest of nature by humans started to
be rejected in favour of a need for cooperation in every sphere of social, political
and economic endeavour (Grenz, 1996).
It is not surprising to learn, therefore,
that pressure from stakeholders outside
the project environment had started to
increase. The situation was exacerbated
by monetary inflation brought about
by the oil crisis and a resultant escalation in building costs. For the first time,
the time value of money had become
a critical factor in project viability and
many projects were cancelled as a result. For these reasons, human resource
management and leadership became
an added consideration in the field of
project management (Morris, 2011).
It was not until 1996, however, that
human resource management found
its way to be included in a formal definition of project management. In 1996
the British Standard defined project
Management as “the planning monitoring and control of all aspects of a project
and the motivation of all those involved