Don’t mistake your ability to get your work done with the ability to manage a project.
Managing a project is about organizing resources to achieve a goal. As the PMI definition of a project indicates, projects produce a unique product, service or result. A process is a repeatable piece of work that has an input, output, and a transformation that occurs. Many times we start to mistake complex procedures for a project. If you are responsible for creating the yearbook, you might feel that this is a new project every year. You are producing what seems to be a unique result, but it might just be a new output from a process.
How do you know if it is a process or a project?
Your piece of work is a process if:
- You can create a checklist for the work based on the knowledge of what has worked in the past.
- The framework is the same, but the content or attributes are different. (Eg. Different colours, different materials, different qualities.)
- You could teach someone else to do the work because you have already been through it once.
We often label something a project because doing a project seems more heroic that executing a process. In truth, executing a process consistently is a valuable skill. If you can deliver the same quality of yearbook for many years in a row, you will be considered a success.
A process, even a very complex and infrequent one, is repeatable work that you can improve on. Executing a process requires knowledge of the inputs, transformation, and output. Delivering results from a process means being able to repeat what you did last time, just as well, or better.
Executing a process is not managing a project.
- Tomorrow we’ll talk about why project management isn’t process execution.
- The following day we’ll talk about how project management is simply made up of many repeatable processes for you to execute.