Someone needs to run the new project. You’ve been chosen, now what? Where do you start? Do you proclaim success, buy the t-shirts, and plan the first social event? Probably not.
Why were you chosen? Were you the most available? A glutton for punishment? Or did management see something in you that said you had what it takes to see the bigger picture yet get your hands dirty, to organize things and get them done? Probably the latter, but not always. Availability plays a big role at times.
What Is A Project?
Regardless, you inherited a project. What is a project? It is a set of activities having defined start and end dates and a specific purpose. It is unique in what it should accomplish. Ongoing preventive maintenance, helpdesk support, small requests for simple changes to systems, and ad hoc activities might seem like projects, but they are not.
Your CFO asks for changes to a financial report. Not a project. You fix a malfunctioning machine. Not a project. Your operations manager asks for a time-based study on the assembly line and ways to reduce assembly time. That’s a project!
Project Stages (basic)
Most projects progress through the following development stages (note: depending on the methodology used, these stages could have different names):
- Initialize
- Analyze
- Build
- Test
- Deploy
The activities and expectations for each phase vary. What you create from each activity is called a deliverable and may become an input to the next activity or even the next phase. One of the final outputs – at least, the one that everyone awaits with anticipation – is the new product, service, or process becoming available in the live production environment. What you are trying to do directs how you get there. The culture of your organization, the funds you have available, and the personnel working with you also dictate how you run the project.
There is a lot to unpack in that last statement! These items will be covered in upcoming posts.
Takeaways For the Chosen
You’ve been chosen, now what? First thing is to understand is that a project is:
- Unique: Maintenance, ad hoc work, and simple change requests are not projects.
- Purpose-specific: It intends to accomplish a specific goal.
- Assigned start and end dates.
- Run in phases, each of which uses inputs from the organization or from previous activities and creates outputs (deliverables).