the organizational context and Fazar's performance Frederick I. Ordway (2014) once more summarized the circumstances in which PERT saw the first light of day and the participants involved : "In 1956, a Special Projects Office (SPO) was organized by the Department of the Navy to manage the Polaris program. Numerous management tools, some old, some newly developed, were used by SPO. However, despite the merits of these procedures, additional information was needed to assess the validity of plans and schedules, to measure research and development progress where the standard measure-money spent—did not necessarily correlate with progress, and to predict the probability of meeting objectives. In February, 1958, a team was organized by SPO to produce a system to do these things. The team consisted of personnel from SPO, consultants from Booz, Allen, and Hamilton, and specialists from the Missiles and Space Division of Lockheed. Willard Fazar, credited with guiding PERT's development, was team manager... Some basic concepts were introduced by Fazar and his team, as Ordway (2014) further explained: "...Due to the urgent nature of the Polaris program, and the particular importance of time in the missile and space industry, it was decided to use time as a common denominator in the system. A significant change in resources or technology always means a significant change in time, and in the defense industry cost is often less important than time and may be dependent on time. PERT, then, is developed around a time sequence flow diagram. MileStones representing important events in the life of the project are selected and linked graphically with arrows to portray interdependencies. Actual work activity is represented by the arrows joining the milestones, and the resulting flow diagram that is structured around these important events is called the PERT network. Times necessary to complete each task between events are estimated in such a way as to give an appropriate measure of uncertainty. The most likely time, optimistic time, and pessimistic time, ... " Presentation of PERT In a 1959 article in The American Statistician Fazar summarized the development of the Program evaluation and review technique in his own words, stating: "The Navy’s Special Projects Office, charged with developing the Polaris-Submarine weapon system and the Fleet Ballistic Missile capability, has developed a statistical technique for measuring and forecasting progress in research and development programs. This Program Evaluation and Review Technique (code-named PERT) is applied as a decision-making tool