A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result

What is a project? I recently wrote a blog post on “What is Project Management?” that has generated some good comments on LinkedIn.  One of the comments was that “the change is not merely to redefine ‘project management’ but to redefine ‘project'”. That is absolutely correct.

PMBOK defines a project as follows:

“A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result”. The temporary nature of projects indicates that a project has a beginning and an end.”

How Does This Apply to Agile?

There are potentially several problems with applying this definition to an agile project:

Beginning and End

An agile project may not have a well-defined beginning and end:

• An Agile project will have an end at some point in time, but
• The end may be indeterminate when the project starts

Temporary Nature

An Agile project may be:

• More of an ongoing development effort with an end that is not well-defined and
• The end, when it happens, may be a long time in the future. That kind of effort might not be considered to be “temporary”

Results

An agile project generally creates “a unique product, service, or result”; however,

• The “unique product, service, or result” might not be well-defined at the beginning of the project and
• The goal of the project may be more broadly-defined at the beginning of the project.

The Value of a Project Manager

The traditional definition of a “project” is probably based on how people have seen the value provided by a project manager.

• The value provided by a project manager has traditionally been in planning and managing the activities of a project to meet well-defined requirements within expected costs and schedules
• Obviously, a project manager can’t do that unless
  • The project has a beginning and an end
  • The product, service, or result the project is intended to create also needs to be relatively well-defined at the beginning of the project

What is a Project? A More Broadly-Defined Definition

An Agile project may be a more broadly-defined initiative to meet a business goal or objective.

• It may not have specific, well-defined requirements at the beginning of the project and
• May not have a well-defined end-date at the beginning of the project probably wouldn’t fit this definition of a “project”

In that situation, the value provided by a project manager is likely to be very different. It may put more emphasis on guiding the people, process, and tools, to maximize the business value that the effort produces.

If we broaden the vision of what “project management” is, we also need to broaden the definition of what a “project” is. There are probably two key things that are needed to develop a more general definition:

1. A project does not necessarily have a well-defined beginning and an end
2. The goal of the project may be to satisfy a more broad-based business objective

The new definition of a project would come out something like this:

“A project is a endeavor undertaken to satisfy a broad-based business objective/outcome or to create a unique product, service, or result”.

Overall Summary

If we broaden the definition of “project Management” to embrace Agile as well as traditional plan-driven projects, we must also broaden the definition of what a “project” is as well.

Related Articles

Check out the following related articles on “Agile Project Management”:

• Is There a Project Manager in Scrum?
• Who Gets Blamed When an Agile Project Fails?
• What Is the Relationship of Physics and Agile Project Management?
• Are There Project Managers in Agile?
• What is an Agile Project Manager?
• What’s the Difference Between a Project and a Process?
• What is a Project? Do We Need to Redefine It?
• What is Agile Project Management? How Is It Different?
• Product Development versus Project Development
• Agile Project Manager Job Description

Additional Resources

Resources for Agile Project Management Online Training.

A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result.

In IT, a project is defined as any temporary initiative which effort is estimated to take over 20 hours and requiring two or more IT participants.