Chapter 3: Projects are the Business

In large companies, at any given time, there will be a number of projects taking place across various parts of the business. Some of these projects will span multiple internal organizations and some will be wholly contained within a single department. In essence, the management, project managers, and project team members consider these projects as part of the business. Individually, these projects will impact some part of the business, but probably will not have substantial impact on the overall business, whether they fail or are successful. As you might expect, this situation is much different for smaller organizations, especially those involved with developing new technologies. In these cases, a single project or small set of projects can define a majority of the total business. It doesn't really matter if it's a start-up business or an emerging business unit within a corporate giant. These organizations must deliver concrete results to survive. Success or failure of these projects can make or break the business. It is in these situations that we can no longer think of projects as part of the business. We must be thinking of the projects as the business!

Business Organization

If you look at the makeup of a typical business, it contains two broad parts (see Figure 3-1). The first is an operational part that performs routine day-to-day activities that are related to generating revenue, such as manufacturing, sales, or billing. The second is the project part that focuses on the future vision for the company and may include R&D, marketing programs, and business process improvements.

Operations	Projects
Sales Manufacturing Procurement Distribution Billing Technical support	Technology development Product development Process development Product/service launch Business process reengineering New capability development

Figure 3-1: Typical business consisting of operational and project elements.

In very general terms, products, services, and processes get created on the project side of the business and are transferred to the operations side of the business. The trick is to facilitate an efficient transfer from one side to the other or, ideally, to have hardly any transfer at all because the two sides are so well integrated. This chapter looks at some tactics for deeply integrating key projects into the overall business to the point where the project team becomes fully attuned to benefits of success and consequences of failure.