Interdisciplinary Reseach

Conventional wisdom around 30 years ago viewed dinosaurs as slow lumbering creatures. The name terrible-lizard inferred large, cold blooded reptiles that lived in a hot tropical climate. This was a long held view initiated by Richard Owen 130 years earlier. Note in the Yale University Zallinger mural (circa 1940) the slow moving T-Rex with tail trailing along the ground, or the Triceratops with splayed lizard legs.

Today's view of historical project management is inaccurate, biased, and unrealistic. It has been badly distorted by fiction, the media, film and pop culture of the 20th century. For example, conventional widom is that the Giza Pyramid was built by thousands of slaves who were worked unmercilessly to death. Based on recent archaeological evidence this view needs to be updated in a similar way the view of dinosaurs has been in the last 30 years. We need to start to reinterpret historical project management, like the paleontologists and look to field archeologists, climate scientists, forensists, so that we can connect or equate it to modern project management, and see it as a natural evolution.

 
This is a principle objective of the publication The History of Project Management which reinterprets historical project management by taking lessons from other disciplines for example, Egyptologist Mark Lehner (Director of Ancient Egypt Research Associates and research associate at the University of Chicago) who uncovered the workers village at Giza in the eighties.