ISO 21500 Standard for Project Management and DirectionMónica Iglesias, Coordinator and Professor at Bureau Veritas University Center, writes to our students in this post about the ISO 21500 Standard for Project Management.
The architectural achievements of the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, the great military campaigns, voyages of discovery and medieval cathedrals are examples of humanity's creativity and can be considered as examples of great projects that could not have been carried out without a certain degree of planning, coordination and control by their promoters.
Thus, it can be said that Project Management has always existed , but at that time it was not recognized as a scientific discipline. This may be due to the difficulty of the first project managers to differentiate project management functions from technical functions, which implies that they were not aware of project management as a science.
Another explanation may be based on the imposition of mass forex data production through standard processes to reduce costs during the industrial revolution . At this time, most companies organized their activities in the form of continuous and repetitive operations rather than by projects as in the military or construction industries, which led to a focus on the study and research of managing stable and repetitive processes rather than on project science.
It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that the first tools used to manage projects were found, which were born in part thanks to the experience, successes and failures suffered in projects in sectors such as engineering, public works, aeronautics and especially in the US military industry, which began to assume that in order to achieve the objectives of the large military projects to be developed, project management was essential rather than resolving the necessary technical aspects.
This is how Project Management was consolidated as a scientific discipline, its international diffusion began and the first professional associations dedicated to promoting its development emerged, such as IPMA (1967) in Europe and PMI (1969) in the USA, which, through publications and standards (IPMA's ICB and PMI's PMBOK), established a global framework for project management.
To further consolidate this , ISO 21500 Project Management was published in 2012. It describes Project Management concepts and processes that are generally recognized as good practices; this means that the knowledge described is applicable to most projects most of the time, that there is a broad consensus on its value and usefulness, and a general agreement that the correct application of these concepts and processes can increase the chances of success of a wide variety of different projects.