by Mike Ososki, PMP, Communications Committee
One single person can make a huge difference. We know it’s true, and it could have been the title of John Salguero’s informative presentation at our Dunwoody Dinner last Monday evening. (Though Project Managers and Pyramids sounds more intriguing, right?)
The story traces the roots of Project Management all the way back to the awesome Pyramids of ancient Egypt, constructed nearly 5000 years ago. Mr. Salguero suggested that maybe this makes the Project Manager the world’s oldest profession, and then asked us to close our eyes. What we then imagined was the Egyptian desert: up to 120 degrees, where rain water evaporates before hitting the ground, and you’d better have a blanket at night. Less than 10% of the population was literate, the average life expectancy was 35 years, and the infant mortality rate was 20-50%. This is the grueling context.
Mr. Salguero advanced three hypotheses ...
1. Slaves did not build the Pyramids.
2. Slaves were treated very well.
3. The Pyramid builders were skilled tradesmen and paid laborers.
According to traditional archeology, a workforce of 100,000 labored 40+ years to build these wonders of the world. Working under the Pharaoh, the leader of this monumental undertaking was named Imhotep. This “First Architect” may also be thought of as the first Project Manager, and his task would have been impossible without having exceptional abilities to plan, organize, and manage projects.
John asserts that Imhotep has been wrongly portrayed by Hollywood. His real story is that of a commoner who performed countless acts of kindness, worked outside of the scope of the project, and valued everyone’s life equally by taking extraordinary measures to protect his people. His life legacy included the Pyramid scheme, in which he had to invent everything from scratch. His practice was to train two junior architects, who then trained two others, and so on. This duplication method was implemented in every division of labor. Today we call it “Train the Trainer.” Historians also give Imhotep the credit of starting the first medical school, and John credits him with also starting the first PMI, and the first Project Management School. Necessarily, some of his horizontal sub-projects were also in the sectors of transportation, food & beverage, and healthcare.
Human life is requisite for any civilization to survive. In the earliest days, the same word was used to mean both human and Egyptian. Over 1000 years, as foreign peoples mixed with Egyptians, society changed and the value of human life increased.
Like every other sphere of cooperative endeavor in humanity, it’s relationships, relationships, relationships that are crucial to success, and there is no exception for the PM. According to John, Imhotep built and nurtured relationships with honesty, integrity, compassion, and acts of kindness.
John argued that the Egyptians did possess the technology to build the pyramids. Proving your story with evidence is critical, and one of your greatest tools as a PM. It must be timely, legitimate, and able to stand up to scrutiny. You must seek out the evidence; corroborate it with documentation, lessons learned, and interviews of SMEs. Read your audience and customize your presentation of the evidence to them, being persuasive yet careful not to change its essence or origin.
This was Mr. Salguero’s mission in his PMI presentation: to tell the story as he sees it, to illuminate and clarify some of the oldest of humanity’s history, and to show its timeless relevance to our modern workaday world as practicing Project Managers.