What qualifies as a project?

During a recent LinkedIn Live session, an attendee asked “What actually qualifies as a project when summarizing project management experience? Could it be creating a lesson plan or procuring items for a charity auction?” 

According to the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK®), a project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique project, service, or result.

Let’s dig a little deeper to see what qualifies as a project.

A project:

Satisfies a set of requirements. According to PMI®, projects create a unique product, service, or result. That unique result needs to satisfy some established requirements. Without requirements, you won’t know when your endeavor is complete. Although you can launch an Agile project without fully defined requirements, you still need some high-level requirements to get started.

Requires a sequenced schedule of activities. To qualify as a project, the project goal needs a purposefully sequenced series of task. Otherwise, you’re just working on your ongoing to-do list, which doesn’t qualify as a temporary endeavor.

Considers scope, time and costs. Fundamental to qualifying for projecthood, a project must produce a result that’s at least partially defined when it starts (scope), work with a schedule of tasks (time) and work within a budget (costs.) In other words, scope defines the project result; the schedule of tasks completes the scope within a timeframe, this making the project temporary; and people and other resources (which incur costs) are needed to complete the tasks.

You could argue that only two of these elements (scope, time and cost) are required.  Occasionally, a project won’t have a prescribed deadline or budget is not a major factor. If you’ve run projects that only require management of two of these three elements, you aren’t truly an experienced project manager. 

Produces benefits. A project delivers a unique product, service, or result; and it takes time and money to do so.  To justify that time, money, and effort, the result has to produce some kind of benefit to the organization.

Given these conditions, does creating a lesson plan or procuring items for a charity auction be considered a project? Yes!

For more about project basics, check out my Project Management Foundations course.