It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between a project and routine work, particularly since the definition of "project" varies between organizations. From OIT's perspective, a project is:
"Any significant non-routine effort that has an identifiable beginning and ending and is complex, costly, time-consuming, requires coordination among a number of people, or is important to OIT leadership."
The final decision as to whether a body of work is a project, a change, a request, or maintenance belongs to the manager or supervisor of the team responsible for the work. The following guidelines can be used to determine if the work you are undertaking should be managed as a project or as some other category of work.
- Projects are not routine. A project involves investigating, planning, and preforming work outside the range of usual activities. Routine work is aimed not at one outcome but at maintenance of processes, whereas work on a project will produce a unique result.
- Project deadlines are specific. Projects have clear starting points and completion dates. Depending on the complexity of the project, milestones may also be defined to verify overall progress. In addition to a defined starting point, a project must have a clear definition of success.
- Projects tend to be complex. Routine work generally involves working on some aspect of an existing system, while projects tend to require coordination of multiple resources to achieve the final result.
- Projects require fiscal management. This means different things to different people but in general, anything that exceeds a director’s discretionary budget or encumbers OIT with ongoing license or maintenance cost should require the governance implied by managing the work as a project.
- Projects are time-consuming. The amount of time required to complete a task is not the single most important factor in determining whether something should be managed as a project. But some organizations will require that any work requiring over a certain number of person-hours be managed as a project. In general, anything that will consume more than about 80 person-hours should be considered for project management.
- Projects require team coordination. Because projects are usually larger commitments, they generally require coordination of resources from more than one team. This requires a plan, which requires someone to prepare and manage the plan and report on progress.
- Projects are at the discretion of OIT leadership. OIT executives can sometimes identify a particular effort as requiring formal project management even though it doesn't meet other criteria.
Examples
Description | Project? | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
Implement New Student Information System | Yes | Meets virtually all the criteria. |
Upgrade ServiceNow to Fuji | Yes | Not particularly complex, costly, or time-consuming, but it requires some coordination and clear communication among a number of different teams and user groups. |
Reconfigure DFS for Managed Services Domains | No | This is an internal configuration change that doesn’t require a lot of time, planning, resources, or communication. It should go through the Change Management system. |
Move Police Domain from underneath ABS Domain | No | This is important to PD and needs to be handled carefully as a change, but not as a project. |
Microsoft Server 2003 End Of Life Project | Yes | Not especially complex but since several hundred servers are involved, considerable coordination and communication is required among multiple teams. Also MS sunsetting of support makes it risky to keep Win Server 2003 around. |
Implement periodic forced password renewal for Principals that have elevated access | Yes | Not costly, not complicated, not time-consuming, doesn’t require a lot of coordination. BUT, it’s of interest to OIT Leadership so managing it as a project will provide progress tracking and consistent reporting. |
Develop a new retiree processing IDM workflow that incorporates anticipated retirement date | Yes | Impacts a large and potentially sensitive constituency (alumni) and requires changes to established policies. Cost is minimal, not particularly complex or time-consuming but will require careful coordination between OIT and groups outside OIT. |
Upgrade Zotportal from 4.0 to 4.1 | Maybe | The portal is regularly accessed by thousands of users and changes must be carefully managed and communicated. Declaring this a project should be the decision of the team responsible for managing the upgrade. |
OIT Help Desk Organization Project | No | Represents a series of tasks coming out of ongoing Help Desk restructuring meetings. Tasks are not time-constrained and should be managed through Change Management or personal task assignment. |