What Is a Project Anyway?

You may be familiar with common, everyday projects like road construction, a new building, or an addition to your house. These kinds of projects seem to have no end sometimes. Other projects do have a deadline, like the local 10k race on Labor Day, the grand opening of a new grocery store, or the first day of school.

Definitions

All of these projects meet the standard dictionary definitions:

    • an individual or collaborative enterprise that is planned to achieve a particular aim
    • a temporary, rather than permanent, social system, constituted by teams, within or across organizations, to do particular tasks under time constraints
    • a set of interrelated tasks to be executed over a fixed period and within certain cost and other limitations

Projects Examples

Using these definitions, we can include other more mundane activities as a project:

    • Brewing a cup of coffee with an Aeropress
    • Going on an over night camping trip
    • Organizing a school play
    • Making a pizza at home
    • Launching a new, digital marketing campaign
OK, the last one isn’t mundane, but expand your project definition a little bit for a minute. There is almost always some planning involved, some set of activities you do by yourself or with others, and some sense of time to complete the activity.
 
Projects are not sacred events, reserved for engineers or general contractors.  We all co-ordinate tasks and sometimes “manage” many simultaneous projects.  To be successful in our lives, we need to bring together the right people for the right reason, with the right resources, at the right place, at the right time.
To improve the likely-hood of success, there has been a long history of developing tools and techniques applied to the management of projects.

Measuring Success

Notice how many parts of the project’s definition are needed, e.g., people, the reasons, resources, place and time. And, don’t forget there is a conscious or sometimes unconscious way of measuring success such as:

    • How does your Aeropress coffee taste?
    • Did we forget anything on our camping trip?
    • Did all the actors remember their lines?
    • How crispy is the crust on our pizza?

These definitions of success are in stark contrast to larger corporate-type projects, for instance. 

Large project success criteria include things like:

    • Meeting or finishing under the original budget
    • Delivering all the features and benefits described in the multi-page contract
    • Organizing all the 10k race participants at the starting line at the start of the race

But, don’t be mislead, even our small, personal coffee, camping, school play or pizza projects can be measured by three important elements:

    1. How much did the project cost?
    2. Was everything delivered as planned?
    3. Did the project take a reasonable amount of time or was it completed on time?
Usually, in a wide variety of projects, the objectives for three elements must be achieved in order for the project to be successful.
 
If you take a few minutes today and look for these elements in the things you do, you’ll see almost everything is a project; make it count!