What a project is: the project life cycle

People run projects all the time without calling them that: organising a wedding, opening a second shop, moving house, launching a website. Knowing what makes something a project, and how projects usually unfold, is the first step to managing one well.

Projects versus operations

A project is a temporary piece of work that creates something new: a product, a service or a result. It has:

• a definite start and end,
• a unique outcome (it may be similar to past work, but never exactly the same),
• goals that tell you when it's finished, or a decision to stop if the goals can't or shouldn't be met.

Operations are the ongoing, repeated work that keeps a business running: baking bread every morning, cutting hair, processing orders. They have no planned end.

A bakery designing and launching a new product line is a project. Baking that product every day afterwards is operations.

Is it a project? Four questions

1. Is the result new or different in some way?
2. Does it have a start and an end date?
3. Can you tell clearly when it's finished?
4. Can you check whether the people involved got what they expected?

If the answer to all four is yes, treat it as a project and plan it like one.

Competing constraints

Every project juggles several limits at once:

• Scope: what the project must deliver, and the work needed to deliver it.
• Time: the deadline and schedule.
• Cost: the budget.
• Quality: the standard the result must meet.
• Resources: people, equipment, materials and money available.
• Risk: things that could go wrong.

The first three are often called the triple constraint: change one, and the others are affected. Add scope, and you usually need more time or money. Cut the budget, and you may have to reduce scope or quality, or take longer. A project manager's job is to keep these in balance, and to make the trade-offs openly with the people who decide, rather than letting quality quietly slip.

The project life cycle

Most projects pass through four phases:

1. Initiation: identify the need or opportunity, look at options, decide whether the project is worth doing and possible, appoint a project manager and get approval (lesson 2).
2. Planning: work out in detail what will be done, by whom, when and at what cost, and plan for risks, communication and quality (lessons 3 to 5).
3. Implementation (execution): do the work, monitor progress against the plan, and manage changes (lesson 6).
4. Closing: hand over the result, finish contracts and paperwork, release the team, and capture lessons learned (lesson 7).

Planning continues throughout, but each phase has its own focus. Skipping planning and "just doing it" is one of the most common reasons projects run late, over budget or deliver the wrong thing.

A South African example

A community trust in Mpumalanga decided to build a food garden and a small packing shed at a primary school. During initiation, they confirmed the school's need, the land and the funds. In planning, they listed every task, from fencing and water tanks to training volunteers, with dates and costs. Implementation ran over a planting season, with weekly progress checks. At closing, they handed the garden to a parents' committee with a maintenance schedule, and wrote down what they'd do differently for the next school.

This lesson is adapted from Project Management – 2nd Edition by Adrienne Watt (BCcampus), licensed under CC BY 4.0. Access the original for free at opentextbc.ca/projectmanagement. Chapters 2 and 3, which themselves draw on Project Management by Merrie Barron and Andrew Barron and Project Management from Simple to Complex by Russel Darnall and John Preston (both CC BY 3.0). Changes: condensed and rewritten for South African learners, with new examples and activities.