What is a Project?
Projects and Operational Work
• PMI defines a project as a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique
product or service. The fact that a project is temporary has a natural
consequence. Every project will, in fact, have
• An initiating phase, during which the project infrastructure and the project’s
goals are drafted.
• A planning phase, during which project goals are refined, activities identified and
scheduled, and many other support activities are properly planned.
• An executing phase, during which the actual work takes place. Running in
parallel, a monitoring phase measures the progress and raises flags when plans
and reality disagree.
• A final closing phase, where the project outputs are handed out and the project is
closed.
Characteristics of a Project:
• The first characteristic is that a project is temporary, that is, it has a beginning
and an end. In many cases, determining the start and the end is easy.
• The second characteristic is that a project delivers an output in the form of a
product, a service, or a capability. The outputs are tangible, and often their
properties are also measurable.
• The third characteristic is that projects are resource constrained. A limited
time is available to build the project outputs. Also limited will be other project
resources, such as the budget and the team. An important consequence is
that the project manager and the team have to find an achievable solution,
while respecting all project constraints. Thus, the output of a project is
seldom the best possible solution but rather the best solution given the
constraints.
Characteristics of a Project:
• The fourth characteristic is that a project requires a progressive elaboration
to build the project outputs. At the beginning, different ways are possible to
achieve the project goals. As we move along, many project activities require
to take choices, which reduce the degrees of freedom, till we get to the end
of the project with the only possible implementation of the project goals.
Thus, the cost of changes increases as a project progresses, since the amount
of rework necessary to implement a change increases as we reduce our
degrees of freedom.
• The fifth and final characteristic is that a project delivers a unique output.
Thus, what a project delivers has some novelty, one way or the other. This
allows us to introduce the last important characteristic, namely, that a project
always has some risk coming in the form of menaces or opportunities.
Application Development
From the project management point of view, we can distinguish the following types
of applications:
• One-offs or bespoke systems that are software systems specifically created for a
customer. A bespoke system often implements a specific need of a customer,
although in some cases the customer base of the final product could be large.
Some examples of bespoke systems include a luggage tracking software, a compiler
for a specific hardware platform, and a system to monitor a fleet of trucks.
• Off-the-shelf applications are software systems implementing a function which is
useful to many different users. It is the software we buy from marketplaces or
stores and it is the equivalent of the Ford Model-T: one size fits all.∗ The goals and
functions of the applications, in this case, come from the company developing the
system, which sometimes conducts user surveys, to better understand needs and
features that are most useful.
Application Development
• Customized off-the-shelf application sits somewhere between the
two other types of applications. They are systems that are developed
similar to off-the-shelf applications. However, they need to (or can) be
customized to fit the customer needs. An example of a customized
off-the-shelf application is an enterprise resource planning (ERP)
system. An ERP system helps plan the resources of an organization
and automate information management. E.g. NetSuite, Oracle
