The Japanese industrial expansion since World War II has been considerable and has been noted by other industrialized nations around the world. Japan began from a position far behind the West, with her infrastructure devastated, and since has achieved a position of economic preeminence, challenging the United States and other industrialized nations for world leadership in innovation and industrial production, especially in high-tech industries of great import on the international scene today and into the future. The U.S. has recently started giving Japan greater attention in order to discern the management styles used in Japan and to emulate them to the greatest degree possible, and the increase in Japanese investment in the U.S., with the opening of a certain number of Japanese manufacturing companies in the U.S., primarily to produce Japanese cars, has spurred even more interest. Project Management is a technique developed around principles derived from Japanese management and then adapted to the American model, and it seems as well to be a method that is now being adapted back to the Japanese circumstance. The Japanese have acquired software from the British to facilitate this process, and the concept is thus making a full circle and at the same time marrying principles from both sides of the Pacific into a new paradigm of teamwork and division of labor. An examination of the concept and how it has been applied in different situations will show how the Japanese model now in use may offer something more for American managers to learn.
Wallace and Halverson (1992) discuss the concept of Project Management and whether it is a truly useful tool or only the latest fad being used by managers today. They indicate the latest trends in Project Management software and the ways in which it is being used by managers--Project Management is a strongly computer-based system which may center on a variety of different specially designed s...