How PERT Transformed Project Management

There were too many workstreams to monitor. Too many pieces and parts—an estimated quarter-million components—to track. And far too many collaborators—chemists, physicists, missile experts, engineers, and others—to manage, especially given the tight deadline that loomed before them.

That was the initial conclusion the U.S. Navy’s newly formed Special Projects Office (SPO) reached in 1957. Navy Rear Admiral William “Red” Raborn had charged the SPO with planning and delivering the first submarine-launched ballistic missile system in U.S. history. The assignment would require the SPO to oversee the simultaneous construction of a new fleet of nuclear subs and the military’s first undersea-to-space warheads, dubbed Polaris missiles.

After contacting Booz Allen and Lockheed Martin for assistance, members of the SPO scheduled a dinner meeting at the Hay-Adams hotel in Washington, DC, with one of our best analysts: JW “Bill” Pocock.” During dinner, Bill asked the SPO to walk him, step by step, through what needed to be done.

As the SPO team launched in, Bill started marking up their tablecloth. Rather than simply list out the project’s needs, he drew a sketch that looked like a cross between a network diagram and an illustrated flowchart.

As the SPO team kept rattling off key milestones, Bill kept sketching. Soon his diagram stretched across a sizable swath of the tablecloth, producing a maze of dates, numbers, and work projects. Bill, however, could begin to see a pathway emerging, a throughline of key responsibilities that extended from the start of the program to its finish, from one end of his diagram to the other.

If the Navy focused on that line—i.e., the critical path—as if it were a kind of roadmap, it could meet its deadline. A mix of stunned silence and excitement might have hovered over the table for a moment. Soon the group left their server a hefty tip, while Bill rolled up the tablecloth and took it back to Booz Allen’s offices. 

Over the next eight weeks, Bill and his Booz Allen colleagues converted his diagram into one of the most groundbreaking project management tools of the era: the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT). 

Our PERT diagram mapped out the sequence of activities, including best-case and worst-case time estimates for key responsibilities, required to complete projects of extraordinary complexity like Polaris. Previous Gantt charts were little more than words, numbers, and bars in table form. PERT, by contrast, was a visual tool, complete with arrowed lines and project circles, that brought the various stages of the project to life in graphical form.

The SPO embraced PERT. It helped the Navy hit its deadlines, deploying its subs and manufacturing its Polaris missiles two years ahead of its original target date. In a surprise to many, we opted not to patent PERT, freeing up commercial and governmental organizations to use our schematic. Project managers in many U.S. government agencies became so impressed with the tool that some made PERT diagrams a requirement when planning complex projects. Within Booz Allen, our expertise in creating complex PERT schematics enabled us to help devise cost-saving ways for our clients to complete their most daunting and time-sensitive projects with blazing speed. 

As our technological capabilities have improved with each passing decade, our commitment to helping clients discover faster and less cost-prohibitive ways to achieve their objectives has never wavered. By 2011, the Polaris story came full circle when we introduced a new cost-saving methodology called ISSR (Inherent, Structural, Systemic, Realized) to help the U.S. Navy reduce the expenditures required to build its next-generation Virginia class submarines.

PERT’s legacy lives on, as government agencies and blue-chip corporations continue to use modern versions of our original schematic to this day. But just as importantly, PERT’s success motivated us to search for new ways to innovate with greater speed, cost-consciousness, and impact. Today, as we create mission solutions at speed and scale, we can be inspired by our work for a Navy client, a groundbreaking idea, and one otherwise forgettable, richly annotated tablecloth.