Projects through the decades

As APM celebrates its 50th anniversary, Project takes a look at the era-defining projects of the past five decades. We salute successes, witness the birth and growth of the modern profession, and understand how ways of doing things have changed. From Concorde and NASA’s Voyager space programme to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and the birth of the World Wide Web, Project goes back to the future. Enjoy!

1970s

This decade gave birth to many awe-inspiring projects, from NASA’s Voyager space programme and Concorde’s supersonic transatlantic flights to the first IVF baby… and APM itself

The 1970s are remembered by Brits for many things – not many of them good. The oil price shock, double-digit inflation and persistent industrial unrest, for example, at least two of which seem to be making an unwelcome comeback 50 years later. But it wasn’t all bad: the 70s also saw an expanding nuclear power programme, the beginnings of the North Sea oil boom – which ultimately yielded tens of thousands of jobs and billions of pounds in revenue for the nation – and the first scheduled flights of the equally high-profile (if rather less commercially successful) Concorde supersonic airliner. In 1976, the UK even won the Eurovision Song Contest.

There were also remarkable achievements further afield thanks to high-tech landmark projects like the US Voyager space programme and the Landsat and GPS navigation systems (see boxes). These projects still reverberate today, as satellites girdle the planet, and every smartphone has a GPS chip and can pinpoint its location to within a few metres. Such bold undertakings married large price tags, strict timescales and plenty of jeopardy to increasing levels of complexity and multiple interdependent elements and disciplines that all relied on one another. They pushed the boundaries of what was possible and called for equally ground-breaking techniques to keep them on track and on budget.

The project manager

Enter the project manager, a breed of professionals who, despite having a suite of powerful planning and management tools at their disposal, were, at the beginning of the decade, largely unknown outside a few specialist sectors. A decade later, however, and they would be firmly established as an important part of the business of Getting Things Done in industries ranging from defence and construction to pharmaceuticals, chemicals and even banking and finance.

APM was founded in 1972, the same year a state of emergency was declared as the miners’ strike plunged the UK into disruption and darkness; Britain entered the Common Market; and the Watergate scandal broke. Meanwhile, on 13 May, a group of like-minded individuals met in the lobby of the Sheraton Stockholm Hotel in Sweden, holding the first executive committee meeting of a newly formed UK chapter of INTERNET, which was holding its third World Congress there, and which subsequently became known as the Association of Project Managers (APM).

INTERNET brought together those interested in applying critical path (or network) analysis to project planning, mainly from Europe and the Nordic countries. It went on to become the International Project Management Association (IPMA). Just 11 days earlier, 78 people paid their £1 subscription and signed up as members at the inaugural meeting of INTERNET (UK) at the Royal Society of Arts in London. Many came from engineering, construction and IT professions.

“The APM pioneers did nothing new in the way they organised themselves and their activities. What was new was the evolution of the new activity, which brought them together and inspired them – project management,” later reflected APM member number 10, Dr Martin Barnes.

Pioneering project techniques

Among the early membership was Albert Lester, one of the UK’s first exponents of network analysis. Now 93, he still recalls the impact of network analysis on some of his early successes in the petrochemical industry. “We got an order to build what was then the biggest petrochemical construction project in Europe, at Billingham on Teesside. It was a £600m project – about £2.8bn in current money.”

The facility was commissioned by US giant Phillips Petroleum, to process North Sea oil from the Ekofisk field to the tune of one million barrels of crude a day. Network analysis allowed the huge and complex project to be broken down into its component stages and planned in unprecedented detail, enormously reducing the risk of overruns and delays. “There was a computer program but we never used it ourselves. We drew out the network manually, on the boardroom table. And we finished bang on time – it opened precisely on the scheduled contractual date.”

It was also the decade when the ‘Barnes Triangle’ of time, cost and quality was formally defined – a concept that remains a cornerstone of the profession to this day. As its originator, Dr Martin Barnes had noted: “It was a huge stimulus to the profession because it showed that it was about managing things by integrating time control, cost control and delivery of performance.”

Medical miracles

Project management techniques and disciplines are now the norm in both the public and private health and medical sectors. One of the more unlikely landmarks of project management in the 1970s was a newborn baby, Louise Brown, the first child to be born as a result of in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Her birth on 27 July 1978 at the Oldham and District Hospital may have been uneventful, but the IVF techniques pioneered by British researchers Patrick Steptoe, Robert Edwards and Jean Purdy were anything but.

They had to overcome not only the huge medical and technical challenges of fertilising a human egg outside the mother’s body, and then successfully implanting it into her uterus, but also widespread public concern as to the ethics of ‘playing God’ by even attempting to do so in the first place. The Vatican denounced IVF, and the Medical Research Council refused to fund it, but the millions of infertile couples who have been able to conceive via IVF in the 45 years since owe the trio – and Louise herself – a huge debt of gratitude for their perseverance.

Technical and engineering beginnings

For women in the profession, it was a different story, however – the 70s’ world of work was male-dominated anyway, technical and engineering roles like project management even more so. But the country’s first equal pay legislation was enacted in 1970, beginning the long fight towards full gender pay parity.

From the microscopic to the macroscopic, NASA’s 1977 Voyager space programme to the outer limits of the solar system also helped to put the capabilities of project management firmly in the public eye. Its very inception was due to competition for resources from the much bigger Space Shuttle programme. “The shuttle proved to be our biggest competitor,” as Voyager’s first project manager, Bud Schurmeier, told the US Planetary Society in 2002. A more ambitious Grand Tour plan to send spacecraft to every outer planet in the solar system had to be scrapped because it was too expensive. “Cost and politics led to the cancellation of the Grand Tour. But it wasn’t that the agency didn’t want to explore the outer planets, it just wanted something less costly,” he said.

So, the team came up with the two Voyager missions – to Mars and Venus respectively – instead, based on existing technology from the earlier Mariner programme. Schurmeier described his role as being where “the buck stopped” and one of his major decisions was not to fit radiation shielding to the pair of Voyager craft. That saved money and time, but at the risk of premature failure from radiation damage to onboard systems. It seems to have been the right call – Voyager provided some of the most iconic images of our solar system ever produced (including Carl Sagan’s “Pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known”) and outlived its design expectations many times over.

Its old rival the shuttle has been grounded since 2011, but as of early this year, Voyager 1 was still transmitting faintly from the depths of interstellar space, and having travelled almost 14.5 billion miles, it is now further from Earth than any other artificial object has ever been.

APM timeline

1972

APM’s forerunner, the UK chapter of INTERNET, is founded, and its first executive committee meeting is held on 13 May in Stockholm. Eleven days earlier, fewer than 80 people had paid a £1 subscription fee to join, and represented the engineering, construction and IT professions. Geoffrey Trimble, the first professor of construction management in the world, is the executive committee’s first president.

1974

INTERNET (UK) has its first report, Programs for Network Analysis, published by the National Computing Centre.

1975

APM is beginning to get organised. Membership is steadily rising, meetings are more regular, seminars are being run and the association wins the bid to host the fifth INTERNET World Congress in the UK. The first issue of the association’s newsletter, The Bulletin, is published for members. It becomes The Project Manager in 1976.

1976

INTERNET (UK) becomes the Association of Project Managers, and signs up its first corporate members: the Department for Health and Social Security, and the Open University.

1978

With membership numbers approaching 500, residential weekend schools are added to regular seminar events.

The Voyager Space Programme

“Nothing will ever be what the Voyager mission was. It was the mission that showed us what the solar system is like.” Carolyn Porco, member of the Voyager imaging team.

Launched by NASA in 1977, the two Voyager space probes are currently racing towards the furthest reaches of our solar system, returning unprecedented data about the planets they pass and the composition of interstellar space. The Voyager programme developed out of NASA’s earlier Mariner project, taking advantage of a favourable alignment of planets as a good opportunity to launch. The probes, carrying Carl Sagan’s famous gold record detailing humanity’s achievements, have gone further than any other spacecraft, returning close-up images of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus, discovering several new moons and confirming the existence of a ‘hydrogen wall’ at the outer edges of the solar system.

GPS

“People thought I was crazy when I started talking about all these applications for GPS.” Kristine Larson, Geophysicist at the University of Colorado.

First proposed by the US Department of Defense in the 1970s, the Global Positioning System (GPS) has since gone on to revolutionise not just navigation, but also communications, timekeeping, meteorology, aviation and defence. The GPS programme began in 1973 when a number of related projects across the US Armed Forces were combined. Ten satellites were launched between 1978 and 1985, and the system became fully operational in 1995. Since then, the GPS network has been expanded for civilian use, and its accuracy and reliability have been improved iteratively. What’s more, GPS will continue to be vital as self-driving cars and the next generation of smart tech rolls out.

Landsat

“Landsat is a critical tool of stewardship for our home planet.” Karen St Germain, Director of NASA’s Earth Science Division.

Launched in 1972 and still operational today, the Landsat programme is the longest-running and most ambitious satellite-imaging project ever attempted. Nine separate satellite launches to date have sustained this collaboration between NASA and the US Geological Survey, producing a detailed, ongoing record of changes affecting the Earth’s surface. The images captured by Landsat have helped to track the progress of urban sprawl, deforestation, wildfires, and the shrinking of glaciers and the polar ice caps. This data can be accessed by governments, NGOs and individuals around the world free of charge, helping to shape policy responses and inspire behavioural change.

Coverlines

1974

The June 1974 issue of INTERNET (UK) Association Bulletin (issue number 2) states membership has reached 190, and that “those who direct the destiny of our Association have shown a degree of technical excellence for organising one-day seminars”.

1975

The February 1975 issue of INTERNET (UK) Association Bulletin goes big on two diagrams that illustrate ‘Activity-on-Node’ and ‘Activity-on-Arrow’ networks. This is cutting-edge 1970s graphic design that helps readers catch up on a meeting the previous December.

1975

The April 1975 issue of INTERNET (UK) Association Bulletin leads with ‘A Pert/Cost System to Meet Ministry of Defence Requirements on Aero-Space Projects’, and features a report of the ‘Communication and Project Planning’ seminar held the previous month. (Some preoccupations remain eternal – Ed.)

1980s

Margaret Thatcher is Prime Minister, and the decade is witness to huge technological, cultural and political change – welcome the World Wide Web, the first Apple Macinstosh and megaprojects like the Thames Barrier

The 1980s was a decade of upheaval. Telecommunications were revolutionised with the arrival of brick-sized mobile phones, and IBM, Amstrad, Sinclair and Commodore entered the home computer market to rival Apple’s early dominance. It retaliated with the first Macintosh. Britain went to war over the Falklands, Iraq invaded Iran and the US Air Force unveiled its new Stealth bomber, the Lockheed F-117a Nighthawk, designed to be invisible to radar. NASA’s space shuttle Columbia successfully made its maiden flight, although tragically, five years later, it exploded seconds after take-off, killing a crew of seven and focusing future attention more closely on risk and quality management.

Lessons in disaster management were also being learned from catastrophes such as the nuclear plant explosion in Chernobyl, the Lockerbie bombing, the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise car ferry near Zeebrugge and the famine in Ethiopia, which prompted the Live Aid concert. Meanwhile, British scientist Dr Joe Farman announced there was a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. A gradual lifting of the Iron Curtain saw the rise of Lech Wałęsa’s Solidarity movement in Poland and, as the decade came to a close, emotional and jubilant scenes flashed across the world as the Berlin Wall came down.

London megaprojects

At the start of the decade, the Queen opened London’s Thames Barrier and the automatically run Docklands Light Railway came into service. The Thames Barrier project – one of the largest movable flood-defence structures in the world – was completed in 1982, creating a piece of infrastructure that encapsulated the elements of ‘cathedral thinking’, during a time of strikes and 25% inflation. A Major Projects Authority report published in 1983 on the Thames Barrier found that in the first 18 months, progress was only 60% of that planned, largely caused by labour force disputes.

The barrier covers the entire width of the River Thames at Woolwich, with four main openings of 61m to permit navigation and six subsidiary gated openings. Difficult to imagine now, its design, planning and delivery was based on a physical model built in an old army shed in Didcot. A novel feature is the use of 10, 19m-high, 3,300-tonne rising sector gates in the navigational openings, which lie in recessed sills in the riverbed when not in use and normally allow unobstructed passage of river traffic through the barrier. Each gate is pivoted and supported between concrete piers, which contain operating machinery and control equipment. In a flood threat, the gates are swung up through 90 degrees to a vertical position and form a continuous barrier across the river.

Projects crossing traditional boundaries

While infrastructure projects remained the traditional backbone of project management, the 1980s was the decade that bore witness to the rise of project work across many sectors and industries, from software engineering to cultural and scientific projects. The 80s saw the birth of audacious projects to tackle disease worldwide. It was a frightening time for those touched by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, but it took until the mid-1990s for a project – the HIV antiretroviral therapy known as HAART – to become a new standard of care.

This was also a decade when the drive to finally wipe out polio gained momentum, with the formation of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) in 1988. A multi-partner initiative that includes the World Health Organization and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this game-changing global project fosters collaboration between national governments, thousands of polio vaccinators, health workers and community organisers. Together, they reach more than 400 million children every year in more than 40 countries, with over one billion doses of polio vaccines.

Closer to home, the UK public became obsessed with the sea wreck The Mary Rose, when it was raised from the seabed after 437 years, in a project that saw technical innovation and collaboration. On 11 October 1982, a crowd of spectators gathered in Portsmouth Harbour to watch Henry VIII’s sunken flagship surface. The wreck had been rediscovered in 1971 by a joint team of Royal Navy divers and amateurs from the British Sub‑Aqua Club, but the operation to raise it expanded significantly over the next decade, drawing in support from the Royal Engineers, the National Maritime Museum and even the BBC.

The project broke new ground in diving and conservation techniques, thanks to archaeologists, scientists and maritime salvage experts working together like never before. Five thousand individual dives were conducted as part of the project. A staggering 60 million people worldwide watched the wreck rise.

Project management innovation

For APM, the 1980s was a period of consolidation, change and growth as professional project management became increasingly recognised and required, and membership rose to more than 2,000. A coup was scored when Sir Monty Finniston, Chair of British Steel Corporation, became APM President in 1984. His objectives included increasing membership, establishing a full-time secretariat and accredited courses, and expanding activity beyond London – all of which were achieved. This was the decade where the SIGs and APM branches across the country really came into their own.

APM stalwart Arthur Tulip (who masterminded the SIG model), spent nearly 40 years working with Honeywell/Bull designing and implementing modelling systems including project management ones. Part of his role was to monitor project management computer programs and software – he tested the early release of Microsoft Project while working at Honeywell. When the Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency launched PRojects IN Controlled Environments (PRINCE) in 1989, everyone wanted to know more about it. Tulip told APM that: “APM and BSI looked to me to give a leaning, so wearing my BSI hat, I booked myself on a PRINCE course and got the response that Arthur Tulip was running it!” PRINCE became the UK standard for all government information systems projects. A feature of the original method, not seen in other methods, was the idea of ‘assuring progress’ from three separate but linked perspectives.

Agile software development

Meanwhile, project management methodologies and techniques became influenced by new product development, particularly the Toyota model, which led to the greater use of stage reviews, and a growing importance placed on the project leader, sponsors and stakeholders. Just-in-time manufacturing processes were also becoming better known in the 1980s, laying the roots for the iterative delivery of projects in the future. Furthermore, it was in 1986 that Scrum was named as a project management style, initially intended to manage software development projects. In its paper, ‘The New New Product Development Game’ (Harvard Business Review, 1986), Takeuchi and Nonaka named Scrum as a project management style used as an agile software development model based on multiple small teams working in an intensive and interdependent manner.

Peter Morris, in ‘A Brief History of Project Management’ (The Oxford Handbook of Project Management), wrote that in the 1980s, “Another paradigm change was meanwhile at work moving project management towards a more holistic perspective: the funding of public sector projects by the private sector.” Following some early UK trial projects, the Channel Tunnel was financed and built on this basis from 1987 to 1994, and it was a finance model that was to garner further favour in the 1990s.

As part of its professionalisation, project management needed to define the distinctive knowledge area that the project professional would be competent in. The initial 1983 PMI Body of Knowledge identified six knowledge elements: scope, time, cost, quality, human resources and communications; the 1987 edition added risk and contract/procurement. APM produced its own in 1991, which was a much broader document that incorporated a more holistic approach to projects, including objectives, strategy, technology, environment, people and more.

APM timeline

1981

The first APM awards to reward best practice, professionalism and contribution to project management are held.

1984

Sir Monty Finniston, Chair of British Steel Corporation, becomes President of APM.

1985

APM’s first Annual Dinner is held at the Waldorf in London. APM moves into its first office in High Wycombe.

1987

APM membership reaches 2,000.

1988

Project management and APM feature in the BBC TV series Business Matters. The project manager has finally made it into the national consciousness.

The Thames Barrier

The cost impact of a major flood in central London is estimated to be in the tens of billions of pounds. With Europe’s main financial centre underwater, the effects would ripple far beyond these shores, too. After a storm surge in 1953 inundated areas surrounding the Thames Estuary, the UK Government began looking to bolster its defences. Eventually opening in 1984, the Thames Barrier spans 520m across the Thames near Woolwich. It has 10 steel gates that can be raised into position to protect against flooding caused by tidal surges. It takes 90 minutes for a full closure of the barrier, with each gate able to hold back loads of up to 9,000 tonnes. Originally scheduled to last until 2030, the life of the barrier has been extended by another 40 years – by which time it will have been operational for almost a century.

BBC Children in Need

A yellow teddy bear with an injured right eye might seem an unlikely hero. But as mascot of BBC’s Children in Need charity, Pudsey Bear has become a symbol for over £1bn of donations to help change the lives of disadvantaged children in the UK. The charity, founded in 1980, conducts an annual fundraising programme that culminates in a celebrity-fronted TV telethon, which smashes its own donation records year after year. The charity is currently supporting more than 2,500 local charities and projects that are helping children living in poverty, facing disability or illness, or experiencing distress, neglect or trauma. The first telethon in 1980 raised £1m. The 2021 telethon raised £39m.

 

The World Wide Web

These days, the internet requires no introduction, having transformed the way we work, relax, learn, shop and stay in touch in just 30 years. But it was the World Wide Web, developed by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN in 1989, that made it all possible. The Web established the idea of a global database of pages connected via the internet, navigable via a series of interconnected hyperlinks and built using a shared language, HTML. Initially intended to enable information sharing between academics around the world, it all started with a humble memo sent by Berners-Lee called ‘Information Management: A Proposal’. The World Wide Web is now accessed by 4.95 billion people, with 500,000 new users going online for the first time every day. An estimated 50 billion web pages are live at any one time.

 

Covers from Project’s predecessor, The Bulletin

December 1985

Possibly the most glamorous cover photo for The Bulletin in the 1980s, there is no explanation for what this Fiat Abarth is doing here. A jolly for the delegates of the October seminar, perhaps?

March 1986

The first-ever AGM for APM is flagged up on the cover, with weatherman Bill Giles down as the guest speaker. Note the lack of computers and the VHS (or is it a Betamax VCR – answers on a postcard, please).

April 1987

This computer-filled room is what the future of project management could look like. The lights look as though you could ask Scotty to ‘beam you up’. APM invested in its first computer, an Amstrad, in the early 80s.

1990s

The economic recession bites deep, but era-defining projects like the Hubble Space Telescope, the Channel Tunnel and the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum are proving the transformative power of the profession.

The decade didn’t begin well. An economic chill set the scene for turbulent times as a deep recession began in 1990. The UK joined the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in a bid to stem rising inflation, only to be forced out after Black Wednesday, when the pound dropped dramatically. Unemployment rose to nearly three million, house prices plummeted and it was to be a tough three years before the economy began to show sustained growth. And yet, some truly audacious projects managed to succeed, like the Hubble Space Telescope, which has transformed our understanding of the universe. The big issues of the day included the technological revolution (this was the decade we started to send emails, and Google was founded), the environment and women’s equality in the workplace.

Symbolic projects

The 1990s also brought to fruition a number of construction projects that helped transform the UK’s standing in the world, including the Channel Tunnel, Canary Wharf, the new British Library and, in preparation for millennial celebrations, the British Airways Millennium Wheel (aka the London Eye) and the contentious Millennium Dome.

Canary Wharf on East London’s Isle of Dogs was reimagined as one of the world’s most iconic business, residential and leisure districts. Housing the European headquarters of many international banks, its imposing skyscrapers were an assertion of London’s strength as a global financial centre and a powerful symbol of urban regeneration. This spurred a wave of similar renewal projects across London, which continue to this day.

Another ambitious project, albeit of an artistic kind, was Antony Gormley’s sculpture, Angel of the North, which was unveiled in 1998. It was a bold new monument that helped spur a kind of cultural rebirth and wider regeneration for Gateshead, north-east England, and its surrounding region. Perhaps the UK’s most iconic public art installation, the 20m-high steel angel is situated beside the A1 and is seen by more than one person every second. The location of the site was symbolic – it is set on top of a former colliery, representing Britain’s transition out of the industrial age. “People are always asking, why an angel? The only response I can give is that no one has ever seen one and we need to keep imagining them,” said Gormley. With a wingspan of 54m, the total cost of the project came to £800,000.

The 1997 opening of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao also had an unexpectedly successful transformative effect on its region. The regenerative potency of Frank Gehry’s masterpiece museum altered the language of urban development, giving rise to the phrase ‘Guggenheim effect’. Delivered on time, within budget (the construction costs came in at €55m) and generating nearly €200m for the Basque region since its opening, the museum is rightly heralded as an example of project management to aspire to. Success on this scale may have seemed unlikely, with a visionary architect at the helm and a complex blend of local and provincial government and private sector partners. However, political continuity over the course of the project and, in Gehry, an architect who listened to the client proved a winning combination.

At the cutting edge

Who would have thought one sheep could become a global sensation? But in 1996, Dolly became the first animal to be cloned from an adult cell – previous attempts at cloning had used embryonic cells. Dolly opened up a whole range of exciting possibilities in medicine, including the development of personalised stem-cell treatments. The cloning process was the product of experiments led by Professor Sir Ian Wilmut at the Roslin Institute, with a team made up of scientists, embryologists, surgeons, vets and farm staff, and backed by biotech firm PPL Therapeutics. Since Dolly, pigs, deer, horses, cattle and monkeys have all been cloned using similar techniques, and – controversially – humans have had their genes edited using related CRISPR-Cas9 technology.

In the early 1990s, the media became preoccupied by another technically advanced project, the Eurofighter Typhoon, but the world’s most advanced fighter plane nearly didn’t get off the ground. In 1983, the governments of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK launched the Future European Fighter Aircraft (FEFA) programme, collaborating with the likes of BAE, Messerschmitt and Rolls-Royce to design and build an agile fighter capable of responding rapidly to Soviet incursions.

German reunification, France’s withdrawal from the FEFA programme and disagreements over everything from the choice of radar system to its name delayed the project, but the finished article, which first took to the skies in 1994, quickly established itself as a cornerstone of the West’s aerial defences and peace-keeping capabilities. “The Eurofighter project is a German project, an Italian project, a Spanish project and a British project, and that is how it should be,” said Prime Minister David Cameron in 2012. At £17.6bn, the Typhoon is the UK’s most expensive weapons system.

The arrival of APM’s Body of Knowledge (APM BoK)

Peter Morris, an experienced project management practitioner, academic and full-time Director of Bovis during the early 90s, became a co-author with Tim Carter and Richard Pharro of the first APM BoK. “I discovered from the data that what makes projects go wrong were not the work breakdown structures or critical path or things like that, which normally constitute the bulk of project management textbooks and the PMI PMBOK Guide. It was how they were set up, their interaction with stakeholders, the relationship with sponsors’ strategy, choice of technology, commercial strategy, selection of people, behaviours, leadership and so on,” he told APM.

“PMI was getting a terrific resonance in the marketplace and charging ahead. It didn’t take a genius to see that APM needed a certification process. The PMI PMBOK Guide only focused on the execution end of projects and that wasn’t enough. I didn’t feel we should write a body of knowledge that was just about the execution – managing projects successfully entails much more than that and, therefore, so should the body of knowledge. We needed to take a much more holistic view… In terms of establishing the profession, it wasn’t just the right thing to do, it was essential,” he reflected.

The first edition of the APM BoK was published in 1991, and was aimed at the professional manager of projects in any sector. It was quickly regarded as an international standard, was translated into several European languages and adopted by the International Project Management Association as the basis for its own ‘competency baseline’ certification process in the late 1990s.

Project management matures

During the 90s, mobile telecoms, broadband and the internet significantly increased project communications capabilities and project productivity, while modelling power improved through Excel and CAD. Peter Morris in ‘A Brief History of Project Management’ (The Oxford Handbook of Project Management) cites one “genuinely new and original development in scheduling” as critical chain, which emerged in the mid-1990s. “Key ideas include considering resource availability when deciding which is the real critical path; stripping contingencies from the activity level and managing them, as buffers, at the project level; and only working on one activity at a time, and doing so as fast as possible… Implementation of these ideas generally requires behavioural changes, and the motivational energy created can be real and substantial.”

By the end of the 1990s, knowledge management and organisational learning had become hot topics for the profession. Project/programme management offices (PMOs) were starting to be seen as important ways to share tacit project knowledge, hold best practice, organise training and support, record project portfolio status, becoming “the linchpin in building enterprise-wide project/programme management capability”, wrote Morris. “From the 1990s, there was an unprecedented rise in demand for project managers, particularly in construction and IT. Project management became increasingly seen as a core competency, recognised within, and across, institutions as a career track in its own right. Demand outstripped supply.” Now, what’s not to like about that as we headed into the new millennium?

APM timeline

1991

APM’s first Body of Knowledge is published.

1992

APM’s first qualification, the Certificated Project Manager (CPM), is launched.

1996

APM changes its name to the Association for Project Management.

1997

APM celebrates its 25th anniversary.

1998

APM membership reaches 10,000.

Hubble Space Telescope

“Hubble isn’t just a satellite; it’s about humanity’s quest for knowledge.” John Grunsfeld, NASA Astronaut.

As the crowning achievement in NASA’s Great Observatories programme, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has identified the exact age of the universe, demonstrated the role of black holes and dark matter in the formation of galaxies and discovered two previously unknown moons orbiting Pluto. However, the project was very nearly a damp squib. The HST was initially grounded following the 1986 Challenger disaster, and then, within weeks of its eventual launch in 1990, the main mirror was found to have been incorrectly ground by 0.002mm, warping the first images it captured of the furthest reaches of the universe. Manned missions were then undertaken to correct the issue.

The Channel Tunnel

“In a year or two, the journey you have both made will be an everyday experience for millions of people. But today is unique and will be a treasured memory.” Sir Alastair Morton, Co-Chairman of Eurotunnel, speaking to the Queen and French President François Mitterrand in 1994.

At 23.5 miles, the Channel Tunnel is the longest undersea tunnel in the world. It is also one of the biggest engineering projects ever undertaken in the UK, employing more than 13,000 workers from England and France. Boring commenced in 1987 and, in 1994, the finished tunnel was unveiled by the Queen and President François Mitterrand. Since then, the equivalent of six times the UK population has crossed through it, and the programme has had a major economic benefit. More than a quarter of goods traded between the UK and Continental Europe go through the Channel Tunnel, representing a value of €138bn per year.

Hong Kong International Airport

“The formation of the site was a complex engineering task, taken forward within demanding budgetary and time constraints against a background of political change… Collaboration between employer, engineer and contractor, and the development of effective working relationships at all levels, were key factors in achieving common objectives.”ouglas Oakervee, Project Director, and Y Yanagisawa, Chairman, joint venture supervisory board of the project.

Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) opened in 1998 at a critical moment for the city and region, just one year following the transfer of sovereignty from the UK to China. Construction of the airport began in 1991, part of a programme that also included a new high-speed airport railway and a third cross-harbour tunnel to Kowloon. Built on a large artificial island formed by flattening and levelling two islands and reclaiming 9km² of the adjacent seabed, the site added nearly 1% to Hong Kong’s total surface area. Since 2010, HKIA has been the world’s busiest cargo airport. It also handles more than 72 million passengers every year, with 100 million expected by 2030.

Project through the decade

April 1994

The Eurofighter Typhoon shows off its moves, while we’re impressed by getting from London to Paris in two-and-a-half hours in the Channel Tunnel.

April 1995

The New British Library in St Pancras finally opens its doors in 1997, becoming the largest public building constructed in Britain in the past 100 years.

November 1997

The British Airways Millennium Wheel is highly anticipated, while Project considers the handover of Hong Kong back to China four months earlier.

2000s

As the dust settled on millennial celebrations, the profession took its place at the heart of innovative, game-changing projects across aerospace, engineering, culture, sports, science and e-commerce.

The year 2000 represented a kind of mythical point in the popular imagination of the late 20th century, at which the high-tech future we were all eagerly anticipating would at last have arrived. A world where space travel would be commonplace, and we’d all enjoy hours of leisure time because robots would do all the work. It didn’t all turn out as expected – the noughties was indeed a high-tech decade, but one that dawned with the (happily unfounded) Y2K bug panic before going on to produce the dotcom boom, the rise of e-commerce and – of course – the financial crash of 2008. And let’s not forget 2001 was the year the Agile Manifesto was written, starting a revolution in the way tech projects would be managed.

The celebrations to welcome in the new millennium included landmark building projects like Tate Modern. The Tate snapped up a prime piece of central London real estate in 1994 – in this case an iconic but crumbling former power station – and commissioned Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron to get to work on a £134m rebuild and restoration. To pull off the delicate and complex construction process in time for the millennium, main contractor Carillion innovated by splitting the building work into distinct packages, each to be carried out by specialist subcontractors. In its first year, Tate Modern drew twice as many visitors as expected and is now the third most visited art gallery in the world.

Project management comes of age

Work was – and is – thankfully, still very much a thing, because to most of us, a career is about much more than merely earning a living. The flipside is that robots are now viewed by many as a threat as much as a potential labour-saving boon. E-commerce now accounts for more than 30% of retail spending and has spawned some of the largest and most successful companies on the planet. But those old predictions weren’t entirely wide of the mark. For one thing, the long wait for commercial space planes may soon be over: Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic project – founded in 2003 – finally made it into space in 2021, and the first paying customers will be taking their rocket-powered 50-mile-high ride later this year if the oft-delayed schedule doesn’t slip any more.

APM’s 30th anniversary in 2002 marked more than just a milestone date in its history; it reflected the coming of age of the profession and the association. As Stan Hornagold, then Head of Consultancy Hornagold & Hills, noted in that year’s celebratory edition of the APM Yearbook: “No serious project now takes place without a project manager and we are clearly identified as a separate profession. The profession of project management is continuing to develop at a rapid rate and is keen to make ever-increasing progress – a mature attitude and a sign that project management really has come of age.”

The noughties was also the era when globalisation really got into its stride, and many of the key projects of the time were indeed about bringing people all over the world closer together, whether virtually through technology like the smartphone (Apple’s iPhone debuted to rave reviews in 2007), culturally through sporting events like the Olympics or physically through projects like the Øresund Bridge and Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport.

From project to programme management

For the project profession, these global ambitions were reflected in one of the themes of the decade: the shift from project to programme management. Delivering individual projects was one thing, but coordinating a bunch of inter-related projects to deliver a phased programme of benefits over several years brought a new level of challenge both in terms of planning and execution.

Take the Olympics – building the venues for the 2008 event in Beijing (the Bird’s Nest stadium alone cost $420m) – was a major undertaking, but thousands of athletes also had to be accommodated, millions of visitors transported to and from the Games and a whole raft of associated cultural events and outreach initiatives delivered.

The project professionals of the 2008 Beijing Games achieved the rare distinction of being only 2% over budget – the lowest budget creep of any Games between 1960 and 2016, according to Bent Flyvbjerg at Oxford’s Saïd Business School. In his 2020 paper ‘Regression to the tail: why the Olympics blow up’, he states: “Every Olympics since 1960 has run over budget at an average of 172% in real terms.” But the Olympics effect lingers well after the closing ceremony, and short-term success can be tinged with longer-term issues. Pictures of the city’s disused and neglected Olympic venues over the following years proved embarrassing to the Chinese authorities.

The organisers of the 2012 London Games – which officially got under way after the successful bid in 2005 – tried to learn this lesson about legacy, and focused not only on the prestige, but also on how the Games could kick-start the regeneration of a big chunk of the city’s post-industrial East End. As Bill Morris, who was Director of Culture and Ceremonies for the London Games, told Project: “The Olympics is a truly inspiring event that can act as a tremendous catalyst. There is a real opportunity for megaprojects like this to play a pivotal role in long-term development.”

Advances in medicine also required the expertise of project professionals, not least the UK’s HPV vaccination programme. Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the name given to a common group of sexually transmitted viruses. Introduced in 2008 for girls aged 12 to 13, and extended to boys in 2019, the UK’s HPV immunisation programme aims to reduce morbidity and mortality from cervical cancer and other cancers caused by HPV by routinely offering vaccines to Year 8 schoolchildren. A study published in The Lancet in 2021, funded by Cancer Research UK, discovered an 87% reduction in cervical cancer since the introduction of the vaccination programme. To date, more than 10 million doses of HPV vaccines have been administered in the UK.

Welcome change afoot

The noughties was also the decade when industry began to take gender diversity seriously. The great crash of 2008 brought the financial systems of many developed countries to the brink of collapse, and cost the US Federal Reserve alone some $2tn between 2008 and 2010. Among many contributing factors, groupthink on boards and management teams that were too ‘male, stale and pale’ led first to the 2010 Higgs Review into women on boards and ultimately to the government-endorsed target that 30% of FTSE directors should be female by 2020.

The project world was no exception. Although APM’s Specific Interest Group for Women in Project Management had been set up in the 1990s, the profession’s reliance on STEM subjects more often studied by men than women meant that things were slow to change. But at least one subsequent female high-flyer cut her teeth in the noughties: Sue Kershaw, APMs first female president in 2019, was already making waves as a programme manager first at TfL and then at the at Olympic Delivery Authority where she was ultimately Deputy Director of Transport for the 2012 London Games.

Landmark lessons – and a bigger toolkit

Heathrow’s Terminal 5 (T5) – which opened in March 2008 – was in many ways a landmark achievement, fraught with the difficulties of constructing a facility that was itself larger than most European airports, but within the confines of another even larger airport that had to remain fully operational the whole time. Boosting Heathrow’s passenger handling capacity by 90%, T5 required a wholesale rethink of the nature of the working relationships at the heart of the project, as T5’s Construction Director Andrew Wolstenholme said in an interview a year before its completion. “Usually in this business the contract tells you what to do when things go wrong, but our contract tells you what to do to make things go right. The majority of it is about integrated teams and working well together, not dispute resolution.”

But T5 also provided a cautionary tale of the impact of saturated media coverage in the 2000s. When the spotlight is on a big project, the risk does not always cease with handing over the keys to a shiny new facility on time and on budget. T5’s early and very high-profile failures were described by MPs as a “national humiliation” and turned the new terminal from a success to a failure in the eyes of many at the time. Caused by a combination of staffing and training problems and inadequately stress-tested technology, these issues themselves would turn out to be a signpost to the future of project management, where people, technology and influencing skills would need to sit alongside the planning and process expertise traditionally found in the successful project professional’s toolkit.

By the end of the decade, APM had begun its pursuit of a Royal Charter, having become an association that had reshaped itself into a modern body. The focus, explained former APM Chairman Tom Taylor, was “to move forward into becoming an effective, modern organisation that could match any other professional body in terms of quality, efficiency and, ultimately, size”.

APM timeline

2000

New APM President Professor Tony Ridley instigates The Change Project to bring the association into the new millennium. By 2010, the subsequent reviews had created a modern, professional association.

2002

APM celebrates its 30th anniversary.

2004

Dr Martin Barnes, Tony Ridley’s successor as President, issues the Barnes Challenge – for APM to become ‘the model of a successful, modern professional organisation, pre‑eminent in the fields of project and programme management’.

2005

As APM achieves a greater profile and recognition, its new branding is launched, featuring a symbolic bird, the ibis, that represents resilience and courage.

2007

Work begins on an application for APM to become a chartered body, with APM Chairman Mike Nichols as programme sponsor.

The Eden Project

“If you want to attract the brightest and best to become project managers, you’ve got to make it clear that we’re the enablers who are shaping the future of the world.” Eden Project Co-founder Tim Smit.

There are very few projects like the Eden Project. Built in a neglected china-clay pit outside the town of St Austell, Cornwall, the Eden Project’s twin biomes rise out of the earth like some mysterious alien architecture. These domes are the world’s biggest greenhouses, and since opening in 2001, now draw around a million people a year. Visitors come not just for the innovative architecture and rainforest flora, but also its education centres and events programme. As a symbol of regeneration – transforming a disused industrial site into a celebration of our interdependence with nature – the original Eden has kick-started a wave of sister projects across five continents.

Wikipedia

“Wikipedia only works in practice. In theory, it’s a total disaster.” Sue Gardner, former Wikipedia Executive.

Hailed as the largest and most widely read reference work of all time, Wikipedia has both monopolised and democratised the way we access information in the internet age. Its founders, web entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and philosopher Larry Sanger, broke the mould by immediately turning over editorial control to amateurs around the world from inception in 2001. The online encyclopaedia now features 58 million articles across its 325 different language editions. Once much mocked for its inaccuracies and hidden biases, Wikipedia and its army of volunteer editors have worked hard to build coverage and shore up the site’s reputation through iterative improvements.

The Øresund Bridge

“The bridge is a success story both for rail and road, and it still has a lot of space and capacity. It is also a shining example of how Copenhagen and Malmö have been brought together.” Caroline Ullman-Hammer, CEO at the Öresunds Bridge Consortium.

A 16km rail and road link that connects Sweden and Denmark, the Øresund project comprises a bridge, a man-made island and a tunnel. Crossing the bridge, which connects the cities of Copenhagen and Malmö, takes a mere 10 minutes by car. Since opening in 2000, the bridge has spurred the creation of an ‘Øresund Region’, with a population of 3.7 million. The quick connectivity means people can live on one side of Øresund and work on the other. Business and industry have benefitted hugely, and Copenhagen/Malmö has become the Nordic centre for many international companies.

Project in the noughties

April 2000

Project highlights women in the profession, producing a dedicated issue to helping ‘the female of the species’ forge ahead in the ‘PM career race’. Let’s not forget the project management of the Millennium Dome either.

May 2006

Alpha entrepreneur Richard Branson is dubbed the ‘Space Man’, with Project taking a look at his nascent space flight programme. We also pose the question: ‘where would you be without your traditional values?’

May 2007

Sporting a new look, Project celebrates the grand unveiling of the new Wembley Stadium, and in a particularly prescient article (ahead of the global financial crash of the following year) explains how project management can help when disaster strikes.

July 2008

The Middle Eastern appetite for megaprojects in the 2000s was exemplified by Dubai, which was building some spectacularly ambitious constructions, including the tree-shaped Palm Jumeirah archipelago of islands.

2010s-2020s

From the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games to the launch of the Mars Perseverance Rover and the James Webb Space Telescope, successful projects are showcasing what human endeavour can achieve.

The 2010s were a decade replete with awesome projects. Take the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, which surpassed everyone’s expectations and left a learning legacy with hugely important implications for the way megaprojects are managed. With a fixed deadline and the entire world watching, the UK’s reputation hung in the balance after London won the bid the day before the terrorist bombings of July 2005 struck the city. It left the capital more determined than ever to make the Games a success.

The London Organising Committee and the Olympic Delivery Agency went on to transform an industrial site in East London into the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The Games were a huge undertaking – and ultimately a huge success. The redevelopment of Stratford continues, with huge educational, arts and culture projects set to open over the coming years.

Big, hairy, audacious goals

You can’t fault the 2010s for a lack of ambition. As the decade unfolded, we watched some truly incredible megaprojects come into being, from Renzo Piano’s Shard in London to One World Trade Center in Manhattan. Shard Project Director Robert Deatker spoke to Project in 2012 about the challenges of erecting the Shard. He also spoke about the deliberately unassuming role of the project manager. “You should almost not even feel the project manager and, at the end, they should come out and say the project went smoothly, we resolved the issues, the client is happy, the contractor is happy and the team is happy. That is the sign of a successful project… The project manager should operate in the background and help knit it together.” A decade on, the persona of the silent behind-the-scenes project professional seems outdated as the profession continues to gain sway.

The Shard has become a much-loved addition to the London skyline, but if you want a truly audacious project, then none can rival space exploration. The 2020s are witness to two such projects that epitomise what human exploration can achieve: the Mars Perseverance Rover and the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s successor.

Space exploration

Launched in July 2020, NASA’s unmanned Perseverance Rover overcame the threat of budget cuts to collect unprecedented data about the surface of Mars. Drill samples and ground scans have taught scientists more about Mars’s geological past and provided further evidence that water may once have been present.

Perseverance has also confirmed the presence of ‘organic molecules’, one of the building blocks of life, and a collaborative experiment between NASA, MIT and CalTech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has explored whether it may be possible to synthesise oxygen, water and a form of propellant from substances found in the Martian atmosphere, paving the way for future manned missions. “The mission personifies the human ideal of persevering and will help us prepare for human exploration,” said Steve Jurczyk, former Acting Administrator at NASA.

Through the pandemic

Meanwhile, the James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Christmas Day last year, is the largest space science telescope ever developed. Hubble’s replacement gives humanity a new eye in the sky with infrared sensors that will peer into the furthest reaches of the cosmos to observe the universe’s first galaxies, reveal the birth of stars and planets, and look for exoplanets with the potential for life.

“On a mission as large and complex as this, almost every moment is critical,” Bill Ochs, NASA’s Project Manager for the telescope told Project earlier this year. The biggest project management challenge so far, he said, was, “balancing all the testing and risk mitigation required for mission success versus budget and schedule. Also, maintaining progress during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Explaining his project management approach, Ochs said: “Always listen to the folks on your team – don’t assume you are smarter than them – and from there you can make informed decisions at critical points. Also, you need to protect your technical team from the pressures coming from above when it comes to maintaining schedule. Risk mitigation, even at the cost of project schedule, is key to success.”

For every successful project that happens, there are plenty that never do. How about the 2012 Thames Hub project (aka Boris Island)? The £50bn plan would have represented the most ambitious UK project of the modern age, comprising an international estuary airport, a £20bn high-speed orbital rail line around London and a new £6bn Thames barrier. Critics labelled it a quixotic vanity project, and it was shelved in 2014, following a government independent commission.

The Royal Charter

In 2017, APM achieved its Royal Charter – a huge milestone in the evolution of the association, and of the profession. John McGlynn, APM Chair between 2016 and 2020, said: “For the first time, the charter gave the project profession parity with other more established professions… Things develop and change, and I think it’s absolutely right that we’ve now got that recognition.” McGlynn believed that this was the first step to helping project management reach its true potential. “Today, you wouldn’t have your bridge designed by someone who wasn’t a chartered civil engineer and you wouldn’t have your accounts signed off by someone who’s not a chartered accountant. In the future, you won’t have your project managed by someone who’s not a chartered project professional,” he said.

APM’s former Chair and President, Tom Taylor, said: “What we’ve definitely seen in this decade is project management becoming a career of first choice. In the past, most people fell into project management, quite often from engineering. Now you can go to university and study project management, get a master’s. And at school they don’t bring homework home – they bring projects. So it’s shifted in culture. People can choose to be in project management.”

But there are still challenges, not least raising the project professional from the behind-the-scenes fixer to a professional at the core – and top – of an organisation. “Those within the profession get it already, they understand that project management is about people and not about processes, because they live and breathe it every day. If you were to talk to leaders of organisations about other core functions, for example, finance, marketing and HR, they might not be an expert in any of them, but they understand and value them, and are able to grow those skills and those people in the organisation,” says Professor Adam Boddison, APM’s current Chief Executive, on a mission to elevate the profession.

Future direction

Project professionals are now expert team managers, with the skills and knowledge that organisations need as work across every sector becomes increasingly about projects. A by-product of the Covid-19 pandemic was to lift project management up the organisational ladder as project professionals helped society and business to pivot to meet the challenge.

Never has there been more talk of using both iterative and hybrid project techniques to marry the best of all methodologies to help deliver projects successfully. Ruth Murray-Webster, Co-editor of APM Body of Knowledge 7th edition, said that she had been keen to lay to rest a debate that she saw as a thorn in the side of the profession: waterfall versus agile. “There was a really unhelpful debate going on in the profession that made out waterfall to be bad and old-fashioned, and agile good and modern. And it’s just nonsense, because it’s not either/or. The reality for most projects is hybrid, which is an element of waterfall, but then they have little iterative design cycles. It’s normal.”

Dealing with Covid-19 might have proven the capabilities we have to overcome a global pandemic through collaboration, but it will be climate change that will demand the project profession gets its hands on every possible tool in the toolbox. And, as Joanna Rowland, then Director General of the Covid-19 Response Unit at HMRC, told Project in 2020: “You can have the greatest strategy and the best policy and the best IT plan. But you’re not going to improve anything or change anything without a project to get it done.” Enough said.

APM timeline

2011

Launch of Registered Project Professional standard.

2015

APM wins best association at the Association Excellence Awards.

2017

APM receives its Royal Charter.

2018

271 people become the first ever Chartered Project Professionals.

2019

1,000th Chartered Project Professional, and APM publishes the 7th edition of its APM Body of Knowledge.

2021

Number of individual members passes 35,000.

2022

50th anniversary of APM.

The Large Hadron Collider

Deep beneath rolling hills on the outskirts of Geneva lies the 27km ring of superconducting magnets powering the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Since 2010, physicists have been firing subatomic particles around the collider, crashing them into each other to learn more about their composition and behaviour. CERN was founded in the wake of World War II as a way to unite Europe’s scientific community, and the LHC is now run by scientists from more than 100 countries. Despite technical setbacks during construction, the LHC has already reshaped our understanding of particle physics, having confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson. At $1bn per year, the LHC is the most expensive scientific experiment ever undertaken.

The Human Genome Project

Take three billion ‘letters’ and assemble them in the right order. That is a much-simplified description of the endeavour completed by global researchers between 1990 and 2003 known as the Human Genome Project. The project aimed to map the ‘base pairs’ – a type of code represented by the letters A, G, C and T – that make up human DNA. The huge collaboration between 20 universities completed its task two years ahead of schedule. The data generated by the project is publicly available for free, allowing scientists around the world to make use of it. Benefits include improved genetic testing and gene therapy treatments, and a deeper understanding of human evolution. The $2.7bn project revealed the number of human genes as 20,500.

The Covid-19 vaccine rollout

As of April 2022, almost 80% of the UK population has received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine – almost 53 million people. Few projects touch so many lives in such a short space of time, but the UK’s vaccine rollout is no normal project. The Vaccine Taskforce was set up in April 2020 to secure access to promising Covid-19 vaccines as quickly as possible and strengthen the country’s capability in vaccine development and manufacturing. It is a multi-departmental entity – a mix of civil servants, industry experts and contractors to ensure deep cross-sector expertise in vaccine development, regulation, manufacturing and project management. A higher-stakes project within a more pressurised context is difficult to imagine, but the taskforce was praised for the speed of its decision-making and focus on outcomes rather than process. “We needed to focus on outcomes rather than procedure and to do this at speed. The answer was to design bespoke governance and to build trust and confidence with the key decision-makers across all of government,” Nick Elliott, former Director-General of the Vaccine Taskforce, told Project. It took just three weeks for the taskforce to get from trial results to distribution and deployment.

Memorable Project covers

February 2012

London’s Shard goes from an audacious vision for a 72-storey skyscraper designed by Renzo Piano to reality in 2012 after three years of construction.

March 2012

‘Mind Over Matter’ is the cover story, which reflects the growing interest in neuroscience in successful project management. It’s a keen theme of the decade.

September 2012

The new One World Trade Center project brings hope to NYC following the deep trauma of 9/11. The building opened in November 2014, standing at 1,776ft high.

Summer 2020

The race is on to find a Covid-19 vaccine. Project follows the story and speaks to project professionals dealing with the pandemic at every level.

THIS ARTICLE IS BROUGHT TO YOU FROM THE Summer 2022 ISSUE OF PROJECT JOURNAL, WHICH IS FREE FOR APM MEMBERS.