What Makes a Project a Project

Projects are temporary and unique — unlike operations, which are ongoing and repetitive. That temporariness is why projects need their own discipline: every project must define its own goal, team and plan from scratch.

Key Concepts

• Project: temporary, unique output, defined start and end; operations: ongoing and repetitive
• Triple constraint: scope, time, cost — pull one corner and the others move
• Quality sits in the middle: cutting time or cost silently cuts quality
• Lifecycle: initiate → plan → execute → monitor & control → close
• The project manager's real job: making trade-offs visible and decided, not hidden and accidental

Try It Yourself

Classify five things you did this month as project or operations. For one project, name its scope, time and cost corners explicitly.