According to David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done, anything that involves more than one task is a project and should be managed that way. So, according to that definition almost everything we take on in our business is a project and should be managed as such.
My view of projects has evolved so much in recent years, heavily influenced by David Allen and Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup. The typical approach to a project is to try and capture everything that needs to get done, organize those tasks, delegate, and track the progress to some defined outcome. This approach suffers from what I call the “comprehensive assumption” that needs to be retired. Projects do not fail because you forgot one thing or you didn’t have everything on a comprehensive list, more often than not projects fail because you didn’t do the right things soon enough or at all. A comprehensive approach to projects assumes you’ll get to everything; the reality of all of our situations is that we have built-in constraints in the form of time, money, and resources. In almost every project plan I look at today, my first reaction is to say, “Which half do you want to do because you’ll never get to the other half, so choose wisely.”
Why do we do this? We do this because the dreaming phase of the project is way more fun than the execution phase. The execution of the project involves people, lots of them, most of which are inherently opposed to change and were not part of your dreaming process so they lack the context over why they would need to change in the first place. I’m not against grand plans; it is a necessary part of the process. Walt Disney famously had teams dream in a “green room” where no idea was too bold, and then the group moved to the “red room” where reality was taken into account and the constraints of execution came into play. You need to get everything on the table so you can decide which half you’re not going to do.
