Chapter 1: Introduction


What is a project?

"A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to provide a unique product or service." This is the definition from the 2000 edition of The Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK ) published by the Project Management Institute (PMI ).

Projects are different from production work because all projects have a beginning and an end. Production work is generally ongoing for long periods of time and does not have a definite starting and stopping point; many production operations take place during the course of producing goods or services. Since projects provide at least a somewhat unique product or service, they must have a beginning and an end. Production work and project work both consume resources and produce products or services. They both cost money and require planning to be done successfully.

Projects can be literally any size. A project can be designed to do something quite small, such as painting the front door on a house. Projects can also be quite large and involve thousands of people and millions of dollars. Projects can take place at any and all levels of an organization and may take place completely within a small part of the organization or include nearly all of a very large organization. The amount of time can vary from a few hours or days to several years.

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One of the reasons for the popularity of project management is the great flexibility of projects. Projects and project management can be applied to any size project, in any industry, for any product or service. This is because the methodology for managing projects is flexible and adaptable to nearly anything we might want to do. All projects will have some kind of initiating phase, planning phase, execution phase, and closeout phase. In very large or complicated projects it will take quite a bit more time to go through these phases. The phases are the same for small projects, but they will be done much more easily and quickly.

We could describe something as simple as going to the store to buy a newspaper. We begin by making the decision that we want to buy a newspaper. The decision will be based on some cost-benefit evaluation such as the answer to the question, "Will the pleasure that I get from having this newspaper be worth the cost and effort of getting it?" If the answer to this question is yes, then we have started the project and gone through the initiation phase.

Next we must do the planning of the project. To get the newspaper, we will have to decide whether we will walk to the newspaper stand or drive our car. We will have to get some money to pay for the newspaper. Will we borrow the money from one of our children's piggy banks or get it from our wallet? If we are taking the car, we will have to determine if it has gasoline in the tank and so on.

During the execution phase, we will follow the plan, going to our daughter's bedroom and getting a dollar from her piggy bank, driving the car to the newsstand, buying the newspaper, and returning home. We even have a control system. As we pass landmarks on the way to and from the newsstand, we observe where we are and take corrective actions.

Closeout of the project occurs when we put the change from the dollar we took from our daughter's piggy bank into the piggy bank and tell our spouse that we have returned with the newspaper.

We said that projects were temporary endeavors to provide a unique product or service. We should probably look into this statement a little more closely.

Temporary. All projects are going to have a beginning and an end. The end of the project is when the project's objectives have been reached or it has become clear that the project will never reach its objectives in a practical way or that the need for the project no longer exists.

We once worked on a project to computerize a chain of fastfood stores. At the time there were no personal computers and all of the computers available were magnetic core memory and worked with about one or two thousand bits of memory. This was a pretty long time ago. The project ended suddenly when Digital Equipment Corporation produced the PDP6, a breadbox-size minicomputer that was hundreds of times better, cheaper, and faster than anything else on the market. Suddenly our project was completely obsolete and immediately terminated.

The fact that all projects are temporary does not mean that the products and services they produce are temporary. There are quite a large number of bridges and buildings that have been built by projects that have been around long after the project teams have been disbanded. In fact, the concept of "life cycle cost"—a concern for costs that occur long after the project is completed and delivered to the stakeholders—is becoming important lately.

"Temporary" should not imply that projects are short. Projects can go on for many years to reach their objectives. Large civil engineering projects such as the tunnel under the English Channel or the Apollo program to put an astronaut on the moon took many years to complete.

Unique. Projects involve doing something that is unique or at least somewhat unique. If we were doing the same thing over and over again, most of the things done to complete a project would not need to be done. It would not be necessary to justify or conceptualize the nonunique endeavor, and we would not have to plan it. We could simply do what we had done in the past. You might say that we should always be trying to improve what we did in the past and that would make it unique. You would be correct. That would make it unique and require justification and planning, and that part of it might be a project.

We also might say that all projects are not completely unique from one another and this is true as well. Companies are in certain kinds of businesses because they are good at what they do. Companies that build bridges are good at building bridges, or they would not last long in the bridge-building business. Other companies are good at selling food, building computers, and so on. They all do projects that are similar to the other projects they do. Although the projects they do are similar, they are each unique from one another. Bridges have different spans and different load-carrying capacities, are built on different soils, and use modern materials—yet all suspension bridges use cables and piers.




The Project Management Question and Answer Book
The Project Management Question and Answer Book
ISBN: 0814471641
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 126

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