Project management techniques developed outside the US? | Hacker News Reader

Project management techniques developed outside the US?

2 pointstimurlenk7 comments

If you look into the history of Project Management as we know it today, a lot of it seems to be related to the US and to US space and military programs.

However at the same time the former USSR had quite a few achievements both in the aerospace and military fields yet I have no knowledge of a formal project management methodology coming from the USSR (China, Japan, India and from anywhere else but the US for that matter).

Does anyone have some better insight into this problem? Anyone from the former USSR that worked in projects?

I believe this is a relevant question given Andrei Tupolev's approach to building planes: he "invariably and energetically insisted on fast and adequate technical fixes at the expense of scholastic ideal solutions. A hallmark of his was to get an aeroplane into service very rapidly; then began an often interminable process of improving the shortcomings of the "quick and dirty" initial design."

This sounds pretty "agile" to me.

Check out Ivar Jacobson (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivar_Jacobson), who developed OOSE and Objectory in Sweden. I used the former in the mid-90s with great success, and it can be done in an agile manner.

Wikipedia says he says his latest "Essential Unified Process" "is a 'super light and agile'" Rational Unified Process, combining "the unified process camp, the agile software development camp and the process improvement camp." It's probably worth checking out.

Thanks, that's a good lead.

To clarify however, I am not necessarily interested project management, I am interested in whatever methodology was used to deliver those projects successfully. Was it the methodology? Was it an unlimited budget?

If there was any methodology developed at the time, there must be some documented accounts. My example with the plane development method is only relevant in the sense that an "agile" methodology was used back in the '60s and it has been applied to software development relatively recent only.

Maybe there is more to be learned.

You're welcome.

Ivar's work is perhaps more methodology than project management and an early version of his "Swedish Method" (as I like to refer to it :-) was used in the early '70s by Ericsson for their AXE phone switch that was (as reported by him) quite successful in the marketplace. It required a lot of flexibility so that they could customize it for N different markets, Sweden being quite small for that sort of product.

The Toyota Production system that led into Lean manufacturing and more recently Lean thinking in software provides a strong counter example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System

That is a good point you are making.

However (this might be a personal opinion only) this system is just an optimized way to look at an assembly line. What I mean is that it is very well applicable when applied to develop projects that consist of large numbers of relatively similar actions (action being writing code in the case of software development) but it is less applicable in one-off projects like delivering a building or a space station.

On the other hand I might just be missing the essence.

TPS led to Lean thinking in general (http://www.lean.org/whatslean/principles.cfm) and the principles can be applied to manufacturing as well as it can product development or indeed software.

I would agree that the implementation as applied to manufacturing is poorly suited to one-off projects, but would consider work in the fields of product dev and software (sometimes called Kanban) to be highly appropriate.

In the case of Kanban there are those that would argue that incremental and iterative approaches are not well suited to large scale projects, though I think that this due these processes still be relatively new to organisations capable of pulling off huge projects, rather than a deficiency in the methodology itself.

May be somewhat related - have you looked into TRIZ?

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