What is a Project?

Perhaps the easiest way to define what’s meant by a project is to consider the differences between the two types of activities that happen in a manufacturing company known as operations and projects. An operation is something that’s done repeatedly in the same manner – in an automotive company, it could be assembling a car on the production line. A project is set up as a one-off activity to achieve an end result. In the automotive company, it could cover the activities from the design of a car through to its first production models.

In a software company, a project typically includes the development of a new software product, including understanding customer or other requirements, its design, code, test and implementation. It may include other tasks, such as progress reporting, documentation, configuration management and the design of any support after the software has been released. An example operation in a software company would be the backup of data or other file on a file server.

A project could thus be defined as: “A temporary endeavour to create a unique product or service.”

What is Project Management?

Project Management is about managing the resources required to meet the expectations of a project. Resources such as:

• Knowledge eg of the system you’re trying to develop, programming languages
• Skills of the people involved in the project that are appropriate for the project or that may require development
• Tools used to achieve the project’s objectives eg development tools, configuration management tools, automated test etc. Tools may also include other items such as templates eg for requirements or functional specification.
• Techniques such as a design method like the Unified Modelling Language (UML), a life-cycle such as the V-model. Techniques such as these provide a common structure to enhance the likelihood that the project will be a success.

In addition, Project Management is about balancing demands, such as:

• Scope – what’s to be included as part of the project and what isn’t to be included, but may be in a future version of the product
• Differing Customer Requirements – if there are multiple customers who will use the product they almost invariably will have different requirements. Project Management is about deciding: what is the set of key requirements that satisfy all or most customers and/or what are the most important requirements for each customer?
• Identified and Unidentified Requirements – unidentified requirements may be features that the customer hasn’t thought of or requirements they assume you already know about. Project Management is about deciding which, if any, of these features can be included within the available budget and those that can’t.

In short, Project Management is simply an organised approach to managing operations. It’s about breaking a large problem down into smaller, more easily understood tasks.