

Project management techniques developed outside the US? - timurlenk

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.<p>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).<p>Does anyone have some better insight into this problem? Anyone from the former USSR that worked in projects?<p>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."<p>This sounds pretty "agile" to me.
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hga
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.

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timurlenk
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.

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hga
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.

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neiljohnson
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>

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timurlenk
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.

~~~
neiljohnson
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.

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fauxfauxpas
May be somewhat related - have you looked into TRIZ?

