Project Management: Building Projects Using Project Management Skills & Tools

I have been fortunate to work on several large U.S. government projects - Minuteman Missile Project and the Apollo Program - requiring major project management efforts. I have also worked with the State of Louisiana on their Coastal Restoration Program which required project management. Although I am not a certified project manager, I am a professional engineer and have been closely involved in project management efforts.



Minuteman Missile Project. In the early 60's, I spent some time on the Minuteman missile program. The idea of the project was to develop a land-based intercontinental missile and to produce and install so many of the missiles that Russia would never attack us. Good project management techniques helped make this a very successful project and enough missiles were put into the ground to blow up Russia many times over.

It was a triumph for project management!



Apollo Program. Early on, I was interested in astronomy, and Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon were two of my childhood heroes. I can remember when the Russian Sputnik first flew and the outcry was heard that we would never catch the Russians.

President Kennedy didn't waste much time after Sputnik was launched to begin one of the largest and most successful projects in history: to put a man on the moon by the end of 1960's.

I spent five years on the Apollo program.

Project management was a key to the success of that program and every element of the program was displayed on project management flow diagrams and other project management tools. If an element of the project fell behind the schedule, and it looked like the delay might, in turn, delay the landing of a man on the moon, immediate pressure was put to get the element back on schedule.

The project management worked! Project completion occurred ahead of schedule. We put the men on the moon! Unfortunately, after a few trips to the moon, we dropped the moon program. Now a few decades later, we may have to "reinvent the wheel" and go back to the moon as the first step of putting a man on Mars in 20 or 30 years, a far grander project than the Apollo Program ever was.

No doubt, project management will play a major role in managing the project of putting a man on Mars.

Louisiana Coastal Restoration Program. Since 1991, I worked about 14 years with the State of Louisiana as a project manager involved in the construction of projects intended to stem the huge and ongoing loss of wetlands (mostly marshes) in south Louisiana. A total of about 75 to 80 projects were completed during my time there. The projects, of course, were much smaller than the above-discussed Apollo Program or the Minuteman Missile project.

During the course of completing the projects, project management techniques were used although the techniques were not as elaborate as those used on the larger Apollo and Minuteman projects. By the time, I left the program in 2005, a separate unit dedicated soley to project management had been set up. The specialization of the unit in project management activities should make the entire coastal restoration program even more efficient in the future.

I will have more on the Louisiana Coastal Restoration Program in a future post.