What is the Project ???

Before you can be a good 'project manager' and apply good 'project management' techniques, you must first be sure that the work you are undertaking is, in fact, a project. Some people say that all work is a project, but that is not totally accurate. There are really multiple kinds of work – support, operations, management, projects etc.

Support, work includes maintaining current solutions that are already in place. For IT development people, support work consists of answering questions, going to regularly scheduled meetings, fixing problems in the production systems, etc. For sales people, this could be making daily sales calls, moving contracts through an approval process, updating call logs, etc. Operations work consists of the routine work required to run the business processes. For an accounts receivable clerk this could be checking reports, balancing accounts, posting journal entries, closing out the system, etc. Management work is required to manage and lead people and business processes.

The key aspect is this type of work is that it is an ongoing and routine part of your job. This is the work you do today, tomorrow and a month from now.

According to PMBOK 2004 from PMI,

A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result

Project management is “the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities in order to meet project requirements”

On the other hand, projects are not routine. The biggest difference in these categories of work is that projects, by their definition, have a defined start and end-date. There is a point in time when the work did not exist (before the project), when it does exist (the project), and when it does not exist again (after the project). This is the key determinant of whether a piece of work is a project. However, other characteristics of a project include a defined scope, finite budget, specific end results (or deliverables) and assigned resources. Another characteristic of a project is that the work is unique. Even if a project is similar to another one, it is not exactly the same because circumstances change and because things are always different when you are dealing with people.

That being said, now you must get practical. In theory, projects can be one hour, 100 hours or 100,000 hours. So, you must recognize that, although the creation of a small deliverable is a project, it does not need the structure and discipline of a much larger project. For a one-hour project, you 'just do it'. Any planning, analysis and design is all done in your head. For a twenty hour project, you mostly 'just do it'. However, now you may need to plan a little bit, maybe communicate a little bit, maybe deal with problems a little bit. A one hundred hour project probably has too much work to plan and manage all in your head. For instance, you need to start defining the work and building a simple workplan. A 5,000 hour project needs full project management discipline. On the other extreme, a 100,000 hour project probably has too much work to get your head around it all. This requires you to break the larger project up into smaller, but related, projects to get the entire piece of work done.