DISCUSSION BOARD 1 1
Discussion Board 1
BUSI 680: Advanced Project Management I
DISCUSSION BOARD 1 2
A project can be defined as “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product,
service, or result” (Gray & Larson, 2021, p. 6). Some people can be confused about the
difference between a project and everyday work, but the difference is that a project is only
completed once, whereas other types of work are done more than once and are considered
routine work (Gray & Larson, 2021). We are reminded in John 1:3 (NIV) that “Through Him, all
things were made; without Him, nothing was made that has been made”. In other words, we are
reminded that despite the individual inventions, we are not the creators, God is. Over time,
projects have developed and evolved with the exponential growth of technology over the last five
decades. The top three achievements in the last fifty years include the mobile phone, Global
Positioning System (GPS), and the Internet.
In 1876, Alexander Bell invented the first telephone and since then, it has developed into
something unimaginable back then. For several decades, this phone was far and few between
inside households because of the cost and supply. If people wanted to contact one another, but
did not have a landline in their house, they had to use a payphone. This was problematic for a lot
of people around the world as these landlines and payphones do not provide privacy and are poor
in communication. As a way to better communication, in the 1980s, technology companies set
out to invent the handheld telephone that could be carried around and operational without a wire
attached. In 1983, an engineer named Martin Cooper working at Motorola was able to do just
that. Martin Cooper once said, “we knew that people didn’t want to talk to cars, or to houses, or
to offices; they want to talk to other people ...What we believed was that the telephone number
should be a person rather than a location” (Moss, 2021). In other words, he wanted people to
each have a unique, private phone number so he did just that by inventing the first mobile phone
that could be used outside of a fixed location and have a distinct number associated with each
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phone (Moss, 2021). This unique product is the result of the project that Mr. Cooper was
managing. The mobile phone has evolved immensely since it was first invented as it and has
benefitted the world in ways never imagined.
Another great achievement in the last five decades is the Global Positioning System
(GPS). The origins of GPS date back to the Sputnik era when scientists were able to track the
location of the satellite with radio signal shifts known as the Doppler Effect as well as the United
States Navy experimenting with tracking its submarines (Dunbar, 2017). Also, around this time
in the early 1970s, the Department of Defense (DoD) had an objective of ensuring a robust and
stable navigation system that could be used around the world. Taking ideas from the Navy and
other scientists studying navigation, the DoD decided to use satellites to support the navigation
system (Dunbar, 2017). After roughly five years of project development, the DoD launched its
first Navigation System with Timing and Ranging (NAVSTAR) satellite. Around 1993, the
satellite system grew to 24 satellites and became fully operational (Dunbar, 2017). This
achievement is one of the most significant in recent decades because GPS serves an important
purpose in many different ways including for ambulance fleets, automobiles, hikers, railroad
locomotives, airplanes, etc.
Lastly, another great achievement in the last fifty years is the internet. The history of the
internet date back to the 1960s when a scientist at MIT by the name of J.C.R. Licklider came up
with the idea of a global computer network (Jefferson Online, 2020This idea was shared with his
colleagues at the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) who
worked on developing the first wide-area computer network (Jefferson Online, 2020). This
project they were working on eventually led to the ARPANET. This ARPANET grew and
triggered projects such as building an inexpensive network using dial-up phones, the uniform
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resource locator (URL), and the hypertext markup language (HTML) coined by Tim Berners-Lee
(Jefferson Online, 2020). Tim Berners-Lee formulated a project to create and develop a personal
database of software models and people (Jefferson Online, 2020). These discoveries gave birth to
the World Wide Web, which has provided the capability for people around the world to get and
share information at an extremely fast pace.
References
Dunbar, B. (2017). Global Positioning System History. NASA. Retrieved May 15, 2022, from
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/scan/communications/policy/GPS_History.html
Gray, C. F., & Larson, E. W. (2021). Project Management: The managerial process (8th ed.).
McGraw-Hill Education.
Jefferson Online. (2020). An internet history timeline: From the 1960s to now. Jefferson Online.
Retrieved May 15, 2022, from https://online.jefferson.edu/business/internet-history-
timeline/
Moss, S. (2021). From “brick” to smartphone: The evolution of the mobile phone. MRS Bulletin,
46(3), 287–288. https://doi.org/10.1557/s43577-021-00067-7
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