What is a project?
- Project = an individual or collaborative enterprise that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim
- Programme = a co-ordinated range of projects
- For a project to have a benefit it needs: a planned set of deliverables (most likely a long term benefit), a predetermined and planned budget
- Project criteria involve a set of quantifiable “success criteria”: time, risk, quality (i.e. that the product does what it sets out to do), cost and benefit
- Finding an equilibrium between these success criteria is the role of a project manner
- The project sponsor is responsible for making and agreeing the success criteria trade offs and it will help them produce a business case
- Projects can exist in isolation (i.e. not as part of a programme)
- Projects are the way to implement a change in a company i.e. not a business-as-usual activity
Project
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Business As Usual
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Seeks to introduce change
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Seeks to maintain a stable platform for efficient production
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Limited by time
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Repetitive and continues indefinitely
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Teams working with unique, bespoke plans and risks
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Highly procedural working practises to enable complex operations to
be delivered in a consistent way
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Specified scope to understand what the project work and products are
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The first few prototypes of a mass-produced item may be a product;
once production is ongoing they become business-as-usual
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Produce specific one-off deliverables
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Produce specific deliverables, but repeatedly
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Have a discrete number of steps (delineated by the finite time)
called a project life cycle
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Products go through a life cycle from build, through operations to disposal,
called a product life cycle
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Projects seek step challenge and transformation
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Seeking continuity, consistency and slow incremental improvement
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Requires a specific authorised business case
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Normally funded through operational budgets rather than capital
budgets. Business cases less relevant
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Project vs Programmes
Project
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Programme
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Constrained by specific objectives understood at the start
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Objectives evolve as the programme matures
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Tactical single solution to a single requirement
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Strategically tackling major changes
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Deliver outputs that deliver benefits at the end
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Deliver benefits throughout life cycle
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Focused teams with clearly defined roles and responsibilities
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Complex inter-project relationships
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May have a single customer defining the requirements and accepting
products
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Multiple customers at different times
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Satisfaction of a single tactical objective
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Projects assembled into a programme to contribute to a wider vision
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A known scope with a clear view of necessary tasks
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Cyclical development where projects come and go to strategic benefit
to the programme
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Glossary
- APM = Association for Project Management
- Project = an individual or collaborative enterprise that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim
- Programme = a co-ordinated range of projects
References
- Association for Project Management (2014), APM Project Management Qualification Study Guide, Association for Project Management, Buckinghamshire.
