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Project



 
 
For all other uses, see Project (disambiguation)
Project (disambiguation)

selfref|For Wikipedian projects, see...
.


A project in business
Business

A business is a legally recognized organization designed to provide good s and/or Service to consumers. Businesses are predominant in capitalism economies, most being privately owned and formed to earn profit that will increase the wealth of its owners....
 and science
Science

In its broadest sense, science refers to any systematic knowledge or practice. In its more usual restricted sense, science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on scientific method, as well as to the organized body of knowledge gained through such research....
 is a collaborative enterprise, frequently involving research or design, that is carefully plan
Plan

A plan is typically any procedure used to achieve an objective. It is a set of intended actions, through which one expects to achieve a goal.Plans can be formal or informal:...
ned to achieve a particular aim.

word project comes from the Latin
Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
 word projectum from the Latin verb proicere, "to throw something forwards" which in turn comes from pro-, which denotes something that precedes the action of the next part of the word in time (paralleling the Greek
Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
 p??) and iacere, "to throw".






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Encyclopedia


For all other uses, see Project (disambiguation)
Project (disambiguation)

selfref|For Wikipedian projects, see...
.


A project in business
Business

A business is a legally recognized organization designed to provide good s and/or Service to consumers. Businesses are predominant in capitalism economies, most being privately owned and formed to earn profit that will increase the wealth of its owners....
 and science
Science

In its broadest sense, science refers to any systematic knowledge or practice. In its more usual restricted sense, science refers to a system of acquiring knowledge based on scientific method, as well as to the organized body of knowledge gained through such research....
 is a collaborative enterprise, frequently involving research or design, that is carefully plan
Plan

A plan is typically any procedure used to achieve an objective. It is a set of intended actions, through which one expects to achieve a goal.Plans can be formal or informal:...
ned to achieve a particular aim.

Overview

The word project comes from the Latin
Latin

Latin is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Military history of the Roman Empire, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe....
 word projectum from the Latin verb proicere, "to throw something forwards" which in turn comes from pro-, which denotes something that precedes the action of the next part of the word in time (paralleling the Greek
Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
 p??) and iacere, "to throw". The word "project" thus actually originally meant "something that comes before anything else happens".

When the English language initially adopted the word, it referred to a plan of something, not to the act of actually carrying this plan out. Something performed in accordance with a project became known as an "object".

This use of "project" changed in the 1950s with the introduction of several techniques for project management
Project management

Project management is the List of academic disciplines of planning, organizing and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives....
. Use of the word "project" evolved slightly to cover both projects and objects. However, certain projects continue to include so-called objects object leaders
Leadership

Leadership is one of the most salient aspects of the organizational context. However, defining leadership has been challenging. The following sections discuss several important aspects of leadership including a description of what leadership is and a description of several popular theories and styles of leadership....


Western
Western culture

File:Clash of Civilizations map.pngWestern culture are terms which are used to refer to cultures of European origin. This terminology originated as a way of describing what was different about the Graeco-Roman culture and its descendants, in contrast to the older neighboring civilizations of the Middle East, which in many ways continued...
 business
Business

A business is a legally recognized organization designed to provide good s and/or Service to consumers. Businesses are predominant in capitalism economies, most being privately owned and formed to earn profit that will increase the wealth of its owners....
 — characterized by a modern matrix
Matrix management

Matrix management is a type of organizational management in which people with similar skills are pooled for work assignments. For example, all engineers may be in one engineering department and report to an engineering manager, but these same engineers may be assigned to different projects and report to a project manager while working on th...
 organization and a cooperative culture
Culture

Culture is difficult to define. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions....
 — particularly favors project-based approaches. Authoritarian
Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism describes a form of government characterized by an emphasis on the authority of the state in a republic or union. It is a political system controlled by nonelected rulers who usually permit some degree of individual freedom....
, bureaucratic
Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy is the structure and set of regulations in place to control activity, usually in large organizations and government. As opposed to adhocracy, it is represented by standardized procedure that dictates the execution of most or all processes within the body, formal division of powers, hierarchy, and relationships....
 organizations with rigid, hierarchical structures show less enthusiasm about project-based work, which may not operate as expected in their environment due to conflicts between different cultures
Organizational culture

Organizational culture is an idea in the field of Organizational studies and management which describes the psychology, attitudes, experiences, beliefs and Values of an organization....
.

Specific uses


School Usage

Within public schools in the United States, a project is an assignment given to a student which generally requires a larger amount of effort than normal homework assignments. They can range anywhere from simple written projects to elaborate and well-constructed Science Fair Projects.

Project management

In project management
Project management

Project management is the List of academic disciplines of planning, organizing and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives....
 a project consists of a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product
Product (business)

The noun product is defined as a "thing produced by labor or effort" or the "result of an act or a process", and stems from the verb produce from the Latin produce, lead or bring forth....
, service or result. An other definition is a management environment that is created for the purpose of delivering one or more business products according to a specified business case
Business case

The purpose of a business case is to capture the reasoning for initiating a project or task. It is often presented in a well-structured written document, but may also sometimes come in the form of a short verbal argumentation....
.

Project objectives
Goal

Goal may refer to:* An objective or desired outcome** Goal , a desired state of affairs of a person or of a system** Goal in systemics and cognition engineering, a state of the domain of activity of an intelligent entity which she/he/it try to achieve;...
 define target status at the end of the project, reaching of which is considered necessary for the achievement of planned benefits. They can be formulated as S.M.A.R.T.E.R: Specific, Measurable (or at least evaluable) achievement, Achievable (recently Acceptable is used regularly as well), realistic (given the current state of organizational resources) and Time terminated (bounded), Ethical and Recorded. The evaluation (measurement) occurs at the project closure. However a continuous guard on the project progress should be kept by monitoring and evaluating. It is also worth noting that SMART or SMARTER is best applied for incremental type innovation projects. For radical type projects it does not apply as well. Goals for such projects tend to be broad, qualitative, stretch/unrealistic and success driven.

Examples of notable projects

  • Human Genome Project
    Human Genome Project

    The Human Genome Project was an international scientific research project with a primary goal to determine the sequence of chemical base pairs which make up DNA and to identify and map the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes of the human genome from both a physical and functional standpoint...
     which mapped the human genome
    Human genome

    The human genome is the genome of Homo sapiens, which is stored on 23 chromosome pairs. Twenty-two of these are autosome, while the remaining pair is XY sex-determination system....
  • Manhattan Project
    Manhattan Project

    The Manhattan Project was the project to develop the first atomic weapon during World War II; involving the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada....
    , which developed the first nuclear weapon
    Nuclear weapon

    A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either nuclear fission or a combination of fission and nuclear fusion....
  • Polaris missile project: an ICBM control-system
  • Project Apollo
    Project Apollo

    The Apollo program was a human spaceflight program undertaken by NASA during the years 1961?1975 with the goal of conducting manned moon landing missions....
    , which landed humans on the moon
    Moon

    The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite and the List of natural satellites by diameter satellite in the Solar System. The average centre-to-centre distance from the Earth to the Moon is km, about thirty times the diameter of the Earth....
  • Soviet atomic bomb project
    Soviet atomic bomb project

    The Soviet project to develop an atomic bomb began during World War II in the Soviet Union. The USSR tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949....
  • Soviet manned lunar projects and programs
    Soviet Moonshot

    "Moonshot" redirects here.'For the Buffy Sainte-Marie album, see Moonshot .Details of the Soviet Union Moonshot were kept intensely secret until the arrival of glasnost....


See also

  • Megaproject
    Megaproject

    A megaproject is an extremely large-scale investment project. Megaprojects are typically defined as costing more than United States dollar1 billion and attracting a lot of public attention because of substantial impacts on communities, Natural environment, and budgets....
  • Process
    Process

    Process may refer to:Biology*Process , a projection or outgrowth of tissue from a larger body* Biological processScience and technnology*Process , a computer program or an instance of a program running concurrently with other programs...
  • Project governance
    Project governance

    The term Project governance is used in industry, especially in the information technology sector , to describe the processes that need to exist for a successful project....
  • Project Management Institute
    Project Management Institute

    The Project Management Institute is a non-profit professional organization dedicated to advancing the state-of-the-art of project management. It is the world's leading association for the project management profession....
     (PMI)
  • Project management software
    Project management software

    Project management software is a term covering many types of software, including scheduling, cost control and budget management, resource allocation, collaboration software, communication, quality management and documentation or administration systems, which are used to deal with the complexity of large projects....
  • Project planning
    Project planning

    Project planning is part of project management, which relates to the use of Schedule such as Gantt charts to plan and subsequently report progress within the project environment....
  • Cone of Uncertainty
    Cone of Uncertainty

    In project management, the Cone of Uncertainty describes the change of uncertainties during a project. It goes back to research done by NASA which came to the conclusion that in the beginning of the project life cycle estimations have in general an uncertainty of factor 4....


Footnotes