The first historically relevant year for the development of project management software is 1896, marked by the introduction of the Harmonogram. Polish economist Karol Adamiecki attempted to display task development in a floating chart, and laid the foundation for project management software as it is today.[1] 1912 was the year when Henry Gantt replaced the Harmonogram with the more advanced Gantt chart, a scheduling diagram that broke ship design tasks down for the purposes of Hoover Dam in early 1931.[citation needed] Today's Gantt charts are almost the same as their original counterparts and are a part of many project management systems.

Emergence of the term "project management" and modernized techniques

The term project management was not used prior to 1954 when US Air Force General Bernard Adolph Schriever introduced it for military purposes. In the years to follow, project management gained relevance in the business world, a trend which had a lot to do with the formation of the American Association of Engineers AACE (1956), and Rang and DuPont's Critical Path Method calculating project duration ever since 1957.[2]

The trend is also related to the appearance of the Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) in 1958. PERT went further with monitoring projects, and enabled users to monitor tasks, being at the same time able to evaluate their quality and estimate the time needed to accomplish each of them. As with Gantt charts and CPM, PERT was invented for military purposes, this time for the US Navy Polaris missile submarine program.[3]

In 1965, there was a new improvement in project management technology. The US department of defense presented the work breakdown structure (WBS) to dissolve projects into even smaller visual units, organizing them in a hierarchical tree structure. WBS was an inspiration for Winston Royce’s Waterfall Method (1970) where management phases are organized in a way that doesn’t allow a new task to begin before the previous ones are completed