The "Shape" of a Project

This series of posts discuss basic concepts of project management as a foundation for broader portfolio management and global governance scaling. A project is:

• temporary effort (has a start & end)

• delivers or creates something

No one “does” a project.  You can only “do” tasks.

A project is just a collection of tasks.

A project manager helps define which specific tasks are needed to deliver the desired end result:

To complete the “shape” of a project, a concept called the “triple constraint”:

Tasks that have been identified are “Scope”.

When specific tasks are desired to be completed is “Time”.

Money and/or staff time are considered two primary types of “Cost”.

The triple constraint concept says that every project is limited these three factors - if you change one of them it will affect the others.

To identify these constraints for any given project, we use 4 questions to flush out these details:

A document that documents these 4 questions is called a “charter”.

A charter can grow to address many additional questions, but as a first steps we want to make sure these 4 questions are well understood.

A charter can be as simple as a word document, excel file, or Powerpoint slide. There are more advanced options as well to document charters (Atlassian Confluence, Jira, etc).