History is visible until today in those everlasting monuments that everybody knows. This includes the enormous stone buildings, like Stonehenge, the Egyptian pyramids or the Chinese wall, but also in the discoveries of the world by Zheng He, Christopher Columbus up to the landing on the moon. All these large-scale projects took place without what we call today project management. Our current large-scale projects fail ever more frequently. Probably we’re doing something wrong.

The participants of those activities did not lose their momentum in the construction, until the monuments were finished – over years, decades or centuries.

• The creation of the world
  The very first large-scale project at all was accomplished within seven days. Everything began with the definition of the time frame. In the second step the spatial framework was specified. After the functional areas were developed and in principle equipped on the third day, on the fourth day the important energy sources were installed. Resources were distributed on the fifth day. On the sixth day the management was developed and the project manager examined his project and thought it was good. In the last step the project manager had a break and concluded his project.
• Stonehenge
  The „hanging stones “in close to Amesbury, in Wiltshire, Britain, is perhaps one of the oldest projects. It started 8000 BC. The three main phases began 3100 BC. with a circular earth mound. For the second phase in the early 3rd millennium BC. are no proofs available. The third phase extended from 2600 BC. until 1600 BC. and resulted in the well-known stone structures. People are speculating until today, how this monument could be built with human power. We do not know anything concerning the project managers and the project teams.
• Chinese wall
  One of the largest project results is the Chinese wall with more than 21.000 km. The overall project spans from the 7th century BC until the 17^th The coordination of the hundred of thousand people probably did not take place in an unstructured way. The project plan, the project responsible people and employees are not handed down.
• Panama Canal
  The Panama Canal with its 82 km shortened the trip from New York to San Francisco to a third – from 18,000 to 6,000 nautical miles. Building upon the efforts of the Frenchmen (between 1881 and 1889) the Americans terminated between 1906 and 1914 the shortcut from the Atlantic to the Pacific for 386 million US Dollar. In the six years at the end of the project between thirty and forty thousand people worked in Panama. In this period of time 5,609 workers died. It is unknown, how the huge movements of earth were managed.
• Apollo program
  The Apollo program had the goal to bring an American on the moon and unhurt back to earth before the Russians. George E. Mueller was thereby the director of the Office of Manned Space Flight and jointly responsible for the program. To the originally planned seven missions three additional ones were added. The program employed in the ten years of his duration 400,000 people and cost at that time nearly 30 Billion US Dollars. Details of the project management are not available.

Bottom line: There were always large-scale projects that required the planning and coordination of many people. The results were so stable that we can still admire them today. And that, although they were accomplished without the nowadays existing project management. Despite the well-prepared PM structures of today, many projects fail. Probably we’re doing something wrong.