The program evaluation and review technique (PERT) is a statistical tool used in project management, which was designed to analyze and represent the tasks involved in completing a given project.
First developed by the United States Navy in 1958, it is commonly used in conjunction with the critical path method (CPM) that was introduced in 1957.
Overview
PERT is a method of analyzing the tasks involved in completing a given project, especially the time needed to complete each task, and to identify the minimum time needed to complete the total project. It incorporates uncertainty by making it possible to schedule a project while not knowing precisely the details and durations of all the activities. It is more of an event-oriented technique rather than start- and completion-oriented, and is used more in those projects where time is the major factor rather than cost. It is applied on very large-scale, one-time, complex, non-routine infrastructure and on Research and Development projects.
PERT offers a management tool, which relies "on arrow and node diagrams of activities and events: arrows represent the activities or work necessary to reach the events or nodes that indicate each completed phase of the total project."
PERT and CPM are complementary tools, because "CPM employs one time estimation and one cost estimation for each activity; PERT may utilize three time estimates (optimistic, expected, and pessimistic) and no costs for each activity. Although these are distinct differences, the term PERT is applied increasingly to all critical path scheduling."
History
PERT was developed primarily to simplify the planning and scheduling of large and complex projects. It was developed for the U.S. Navy Special Projects Office in 1957 to support the U.S. Navy's Polaris nuclear submarine project. It found applications all over industry. An early example is when it was used for the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble which applied PERT from 1965 until the opening of the 1968 Games. This project model was the first of its kind, a revival for scientific management, founded by Frederick Taylor (Taylorism) and later refined by Henry Ford (Fordism). DuPont's critical path method was invented at roughly the same time as PERT.
Initially PERT stood for Program Evaluation Research Task, but by 1959 was renamed. It had been made public in 1958 in two publications of the U.S. Department of the Navy, entitled Program Evaluation Research Task, Summary Report, Phase 1. and Phase 2. In a 1959 article in The American Statistician the main Willard Fazar, Head of the Program Evaluation Branch, Special Projects Office, U.S. Navy, gave a detailed description of the main concepts of the PERT. He explained:
Ten years after the introduction of PERT in 1958 the American librarian Maribeth Brennan published a selected bibliography with about 150 publications on PERT and CPM, which had been published between 1958 and 1968. The origin and development was summarized as follows:
For the subdivision of work units in PERT another tool was developed: the Work Breakdown Structure. The Work Breakdown Structure provides "a framework for complete networking, the Work Breakdown Structure was formally introduced as the first item of analysis in carrying out basic PERT/COST."
Terminology
Events and activities
In a PERT diagram, the main building block is the event, with connections to its known predecessor events and successor events. PERT event: a point that marks the start or completion of one or more activities. It consumes no time and uses no resources. When it marks the completion of one or more activities, it is not "reached" (does not occur) until all of the activities leading to that event have been completed. predecessor event: an event that immediately precedes some other event without any other events intervening. An event can have multiple predecessor events and can be the predecessor of multiple events. successor event: an event that immediately follows some other event without any other intervening events. An event can have multiple successor events and can be the successor of multiple events.