OR and project management

Projects are a way of life for operational researchers. We work on them, we manage them, and occasionally we help clients to manage their own projects. On the basis of what most OR textbooks and courses contain, one might be forgiven for supposing that operational researchers see project management primarily as the application of a number of activity planning and control techniques. Activity networks, critical path analysis, PERT and so on, are apparently standard techniques with which any self-respecting operational researcher is expected to be familiar. Yet how many practitioners are called upon to apply these techniques? Fewer and fewer, one suspects, as time goes by. The reason for this is not that such techniques are not useful, but that they have become an integral part of the efficient and effective management of any substantial project. Professional project managers, for example in engineering and construction, are fully versed in the use of project planning and control techniques. Moreover, with the availability of sophisticated project planning software packages, these professional specialists have no need to call in the OR (general?) practitioner. In a way of course, this is a success story for OR; would-be clients have adopted a number of OR techniques as standard practice.