Project Rule #3

Not Everything is a Project

Project Rule #1 says that “A project is an effort undertaken for a specific purpose, with an intended outcome, and a clear beginning and ending.”

So what is NOT a project?

Any effort that is purely repetitive is not a project, though repetitive efforts may be part of a project.

Just working on something doesn’t make it a project. It must be an intentional effort with a planned result in a specific timeframe. Simply going through your day doesn’t make the day’s effort a project.

If you show up to a factory every day and run a machine that produces a widget, you can’t really call yourself a project manager. You’re doing a task and doing your job, but you aren’t running a project.

The same is true if you work in a call center providing customer service or maintain the accounting and finances for your company.

It becomes a project when the effort becomes explicit. Remember: it must have a specific purpose, intended outcome, and a beginning and ending.

So running the production of a specific widget for a specific time could be a project.

Implementing a new customer service software platform could be a project.

Conducting the annual close of your company’s financial statements or preparing annual tax filings could be a project.

Writing a blog post is not a project. Writing a book…could be!

Step out beyond the repetitive tasks that make up the day-to-day activities. They may be a part of a project, but they aren’t a project in and of themselves.

Are you stuck in a repetitive cycle? Could you restructure your efforts into a project-based approach to gain new perspective and make more progress?

Project Rule #2

Someone Has To Be In Charge

This rule shouldn’t even need to be written. It is incredibly obvious, yet it gets broken a lot.

If you are doing a project for yourself, you are the project manager and the chief stakeholder (more on stakeholders in a future post).

Bottom line: you are 100% in charge. Welcome the responsibility and simplicity of it all.

But not all projects have such a singular focus. On larger projects, with multiple stakeholders and implementation teams, it isn’t always clear who is in charge.

I worked on one project where there were four project managers:

• The Client’s PM
• The Client’s IT organization PM
• The Product Vendor’s PM
• The Advisory Consultant’s PM

When the project started to fall behind, against my adamant advice (I was on the consulting team) that they needed to pick one of the four to be “in charge”, the client’s management team appointed four MORE project managers. Now eight people were riding the project into the ground. It was ridiculous!

Even with all of these parties playing their role on the project, there needed to be a single person who could manage their efforts, provide guidance and direction, and ultimately, make the hard decisions that have to be made.

At the end of the day, one average project manager is better than four good ones who can’t agree on how to move forward. The BUCK has to stop somewhere.

Do you have any horror stories from dysfunctional projects due to poor leadership or unclear leadership roles?

I’m very excited to begin a new series of blog posts today related to Project Management…WAIT! Keep reading! This is Project Management for regular people. Even if you’re familiar with PM jargon, I want to simplify and demystify it.

Too often PM pros like myself become enamored with the language of our profession. Honestly, most professions are like that. Doctors, lawyers, teachers…they all have their ways of communicating, often in very strange terms and acronyms. It works when they talk to each other, but frustrates everyone else.

Over the next month or so, my goal is to take what we do and boil it down to the essential truths. This will help pros communicate with their clients (and family members), and help non-pros see and improve the power of project management in their own lives (yes, you’re probably already doing it!).

So we start today with:

Project Rule #1

What is a Project?

A project is an effort undertaken for a specific purpose, with an intended outcome, and a clear beginning and ending.

That’s it!

Digging a bit deeper, we can identify the key components of a project:

• Specific Purpose – Why are we doing it? What is the motivation?
• Intended Outcome – What do we want to accomplish? What is the result of the project?
• Beginning – When does it start?
• Ending – When does it end?

The Specific Purpose and Intended Outcome are related, but not quite the same. If our project is to bake a wedding cake, the Specific Purpose tells us that it is part of a celebration and must look and taste beautiful. The intended outcome tells us that it needs to serve 100 guests, have buttercream icing, four tiered layers and a plastic bride and groom on top. There is overlap in the two terms, but the details vary.

The Beginning and Ending mean our project is finite. It cannot last forever. The effort must begin at a certain point and end at a certain point. A wedding is a project. It is planned, it occurs, and then it is over. The wedding does not last for years. But a marriage is not a project. While it does have an end date (till death do we part), that end is not known and not planned for.

Projects vary in size and scope (more on that later). But everything from baking a cake to building the worlds largest yacht to putting a man on the moon involves projects.

Any questions? Any new ideas come to mind concerning projects? Do you see more projects around you, or things you thought were projects but aren’t?