Project management in its present form began to take root a few decades ago.

In the early 1960s, industrial and business organizations began to understand the benefits of organizing work around projects.

They understood the critical need to communicate and integrate work across multiple departments and professions.

The Project Management Institute (PMI) was founded in 1969 by five volunteers.

Their initial goal was to establish an organization where members could share their experiences in project management and to discuss issues.

Today, PMI is a non-prot project management professional association and the most widely recognized

organization in terms of promoting project management best practices.

PMI was formed to serve the interests of the project management industry.

The premise of PMI is that the tools and techniques of project management are common even

among the widespread application of projects from the software to the construction industry.

PMI first began offering the PMP certification exam in 1984.

Although it took a while for people to take notice, now more than 260,000 individuals around the world hold the PMP designation.

To help keep project management terms and concepts clear and consistent, PMI

introduced the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) Guide in 1987.

They updated it in 1996, 2000, 2004, 2009 and most recently in 2017 as the sixth edition.

At present, there are more than 1 million copies of the PMBOK Guide in circulation.

The highly regarded Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) have adopted

it as their project management standard. In 1999 PMI was accredited as an American National Standards Institute (ANSI)

standards developer and also has the distinction of being the first organization to have its

certification program attain International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001 recognition.

In 2008, the organization reported more than 260,000 members in over 171 countries.

PMI also has offices in Washington, D.C., and Beijing, China, as well as Regional Service Centers in Singapore, Brussels (Belgium)

and New Delhi (India). Recently, an office was opened in Mumbai (India). 

As long as humankind does things, there will be projects. Many projects of the future will be similar to those in the past.

Others will be different either in terms of increased scale of effort or more advanced technology.

Representative of the latter are three recent projects—the English Channel tunnel (Chunnel)

, the international space station, and SpaceShipOne.

The Chunnel required tremendous resources and took a decade to complete. The international space station (Figure 1.5)

has required development of new technologies and the efforts of the US, Russian, European, Canadian, and Japanese space agencies.

SpaceShipOne is the venture of a small California company aimed at developing a vehicle and launch system for future space tourism.