Hello,
I am working in a faily new company that determines a project (other
than has a start and finish date) as something over 6 months long and
greater than a specific dollar value eg. 200K. We are looking at
revisiting this criteria.
Does anyone have any experience or ideas on how other companies define
a project?
Thanks,
Marc
The best definition I've read of a project comes from Lewis' book,
"Project Planning, Scheduling and Control", in a sidebar. A project is
a "problem scheduled for a solution". That being said, I'm not a
believer that everything should be handled using the discipline of
Project Management. Really small projects don't need it, or at least,
very much of it. I also believe in a multi-level PM approach. You don't
need the same level of discipline for a $100,000 project that you do
for a $100,000,000 project. And if you apply the level of discipline to
a small project that you apply to a large one, you'll bury it in
unneccessary costs. Things need to be scaled back on small projects.
I've seen all kinds of extremes of misapplication. I worked for a large
engineering/construction company that always had huge overruns on
projects under about $50 million because they treated them like much
bigger projects and the overhead was huge. And I had a client that had
a policy that nothing could be considered in an employee's evaluation
unless it was a project, complete with schedule, risk analysis, etc.
The IT department was spending 2 hrs doing the paperwork everytime they
had a 10 min fix on someone's computer! And this was a big divsion of a
major Fortune 500 company.
I'd look at your question from the standpoint of what size of projects
require the discipline of PM, and how much of it? How critical is it to
your organization's success? How much money and how many people will be
affected? And I don't just mean how much is the budget and how many are
actual project resources. A small budget project can have big affects
on an organization. So how "mission-critical" is the project,
regardless of direct cost? I don't think it's wise to try to reduce it
to a simple formula or list. Saying a project under $200,000 doesn't
require PM is setting yourself up to fail on something really crucial.
And saying PM is required on anything over $200,000 can cause you
problems too. Judgement is required here.
If I were setting this up for an organization, I'd come up with a
scaled rating system of some kind. Rate the project based on budget,
number of resources but also on how critical it is to the organization
and what the downstream affects on revenue, sales, status, public
relations, etc. If you don't put in some intangibles you'll miss the
boat. This might go against the grain of your accounting people, and
others who think you can't quantify these things, but if you fail to do
so, you'll shoot yourself in the foot.
Hope this helps in your world.
