The Legends of Project Management

 If you think about famous projects do you know who was the project manager behind them?  Project management isn’t a good career for those looking for fame. They tend to be the unsung heroes that are in the trenches getting the job done, on time and if possible under budget. What they build however lives in our collective memory for years.

One very famous project is that of the Boulder Canyon or Hoover Dam. It was constructed between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression and was dedicated on September 30, 1935, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

On January 10, 1931, the Bureau made the bid documents available to interested parties, at five dollars a copy. The government was to provide the materials; but the contractor was to prepare the site and build the dam. The dam was described in minute detail, covering 100 pages of text and 76 drawings. A $2 million bid bond was to accompany each bid; the winner would have to post a $5 million performance bond. The contractor had seven years to build the dam, or penalties would ensue.

Hoover Dam was an audacious and courageous undertaking. Built during the Great Depression, the dam would tame the flood-prone Colorado River southeast of Las Vegas, protecting cities and farms, generating cheap electricity to supply power to homes and industry, and providing work for thousands who desperately needed jobs.

A consortium called Six Companies Inc., which included Bechtel, won the right to build the concrete arch dam, at a cost of nearly $49 million, a staggering amount in the early 1930s (roughly equivalent to $860 million today). Skeptics thought it couldn’t be done. Others were convinced that the contractors would go bust.

By any measure, Hoover Dam is stupendous. It looms 726 feet above Black Canyon on the Arizona-Nevada state line. It’s 660 feet wide at the base and 1,244 feet across at the top. It weighs 6.6 million tons. Behind the dam, Lake Mead is the country’s largest reservoir, capable of holding more than 9 trillion gallons of water from the Colorado River. Water from the lake drives turbines inside the dam that generate electricity for Arizona, Nevada, and Southern California.

The contractors finished their work two years ahead of schedule and millions of dollars under budget. Today, the Hoover Dam is the second highest dam in the country and the 18th highest in the world. It generates enough energy each year to serve over a million people.

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