Discovering the Panama Canal by myself was fascinating as a remarkable success story in Project Management:
• The project smartly used the lessons learned by the failure of the French attempt to dig a deep canal connecting two oceans and leveraged instead the natural geography of Panama, using an existing river crossing part of the isthmus.
• On the product level; It was designed according to worldwide ship dimension standards, ensuring global compatibility from the beginning.
• It also solved a very concrete market need: reducing maritime routes by nearly 20,000 km instead of navigating around South America.
• On the environmental level; The creation of the artificial lake feeding the locks expanded by more than 10 times the protected natural areas around the canal.
• With respect to team management; The canal enlargement project involved 35 countries and over 20,000 workers, under the leadership of a woman engineer, Ilya Espino de Marotta, who started her career in lock maintenance and deeply understood the operational subtleties of the canal.
• The project relied on rigorous PMI-style governance and execution methods, helping deliver such a massive transformation within a relatively short timeframe.
It is worth reading more on it or even better, seeing it by yourself. With combining the right team, product vision, and leadership, the Panama Canal is a good Project Management lesson.