<P> The trend is also related to the appearance of the Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) in 1958 . PERT went further with monitoring projects, and enabled users to monitor tasks, being at the same time able to evaluate their quality, and to estimate the time needed to accomplish each of them . As with Gantt charts and CPM, PERT was invented for military purposes, this time for the US Navy Polaris missile submarine program . </P> <P> In 1965, there was a new improvement in project management technology . The US department of defense presented the work breakdown structure (WBS) to dissolve projects to even smaller visual units, organizing them in hierarchical tree structure . WBS was an inspiration for Winston Royce's Waterfall Method (1970) where management phases are organized in a way which doesn't allow a new task to begin before the previous ones are completed . </P> <P> In the period between 1965 and 1969 were formed two of the leading project management associations: the International Project Management Association (IPMA) in Europe, and the Project Management Institute (PMI) which trains project management professionals and issues certificates . With business shifting towards technology - based and paperless methods, the first project management systems started to emerge . Oracle and Artemis launched their project managers in 1977, while Scitor Corporation did the same in 1979 . Many improvements followed in the upcoming decades: in 1986, Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute introduced capability maturity software, a five - level project management method for rapidly maturing processes, while in 1988 users met earned value management which added processes' scope and cost to the schedule . The trend continued with PRINCE2 (1996) which increased the number of processes to seven, because of which developers considered designing products for managing complex projects . In 2001, they adopted the Agile project management concept, and focused on adaptive planning and flexible response to changes . In 2006, users were already able to trigger total cost management, a framework that helps controlling and reducing costs in project management . </P> <P> The SaaS (software - as - a-service) trend began in 2008, qualified by users as the most flexible type of project management software for their teams . In 2009, US News classified project management as one of the most demanded skills for obtaining a well - paid job . </P>

How does project management software help plan track and manage projects