What a project is

A project is a temporary effort to create a unique result: a bridge, a building, a water scheme. It has a start and an end, a defined scope, a budget and a team assembled for it. That makes it different from operations, which repeat the same work indefinitely.

Every project balances scope, time and cost, with quality as the measure of whether the result is fit for its purpose. Changing one moves the others: adding scope costs time or money; cutting time usually costs money.

Projects move through a life cycle: initiation, when the need and feasibility are set; planning, when scope, schedule, budget, risks and procurement are defined; execution, when the work is built; monitoring and control, which runs alongside to compare progress with plan; and closing, with handover, final accounts and lessons learned.

Construction projects add their own features: many parties under separate contracts, work outdoors exposed to weather and ground risk, and a one-off site organisation. The rest of this family of subjects covers cost, schedule, contracts, quality and safety, procurement and BIM.

Success is judged against the objectives agreed at the start, so those objectives must be clear, measurable and shared by the owner, designers and contractors. Most troubled projects can trace their problems back to a vague scope, an unrealistic budget or schedule set before the design was mature, or poor communication between the parties.