2.1 Projects, Operations, and Organizational Progress

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hello and welcome back to Enterprise Project Management

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for this lesson. We're going to cover the difference between projects, operations and what organizational progresses.

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So one of the things that I like to use a swimming analogy,

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which makes a lot of sense to me because I'm a retired military diver

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but

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operations day to day activities, the things that the organization does

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would be the equivalent of treading water if you were, say, in the middle of the ocean or middle of a pool, something along those lines and the reason why I use that term treading water is because

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operational activities are vitally important to the welfare of the organization. If you stop treading water, you'll drown.

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If the organization is unable to conduct operations day to day activities, the normal functioning of the business,

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they will not have the revenue with which to invest in enterprise projects. So

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what we want to look at as we get into enterprise project management, especially with dependency that constrains, is you have to realize that you can't shut down an organization, spend a bunch of money to do some sort of enterprise level project

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because there will be no money so we have to dovetail operations and day to day activities into the strategy. Execution of an enterprise project.

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The Enterprise Project Strategy. Execution Peace is what helps organization swim to shore. So you have to tread water first, and you have to remain afloat during the entire project, obviously,

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but if you don't do enterprise project management, then you'll never be able to change your direction and move to shore or move to the side of the pool to accomplish your strategic objective

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of the organization.

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So there are operational considerations

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on enterprise projects and the really operational considerations on all projects, but they're especially important enterprise projects. You cannot

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affect the operations too heavily

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during the execution of an enterprise project.

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Conversely, you can't let the day to day activities get in the way of your ability to swim to shore, because if you tread water,

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you get tired. Eventually, you won't have the ability to swim to shore. So there's there's quite a balance that you need to strike

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between strategy, execution or enterprise project management. They're kind of the same thing

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and

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your operational and day to day activities.

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Let's talk a little bit about the Project Life cycle.

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What we call project originations or ideation, that the terms are kind of interchangeable is really the idea that

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we can on Lee do so much right Iron Triangle strikes again.

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We have all these great ideas, all these possibilities, all these business challenges, all these opportunities in front of us.

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But we don't have infinite resource is we don't have the abilities to pursue too many different strategies. At the same time, not even a major conglomerate like G E can pursue too many different strategy at the same time. That simply isn't the resource capacity within the organization.

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So part of the project origination process is what I call the idea. Finally see a little picture on your right there way have these ideas, thieves, thieves, things that we wanna potentially research and try to execute and turn into the next

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Tesla or, you know, whatever the next great organizational world changing project.

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But

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we have to look at what's the business case with the initial scope

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and the really getting to, from an executive level standpoint, sort of the two questions of Can we do it?

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And should we do it right, So Enterprise project management is not necessarily about doing things correctly, although there is definitely that component in execution. But it's really about

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at the origination level anyway. It's really about doing the right things. So the Project Life cycle begins

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in origination or ideation, and it's trying to select what are the right things that we should be doing. And part of that has to do with a project investment mindset, and we'll get into some more detail on it later on in the course. But think of it as if you were investing your own money

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into an organization.

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That portfolio you might have some money in stocks might have some money in bonds. You might have some money in gold or silver whatever,

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but the portfolio is what you care about. You don't necessarily care whether one company is doing better than another company, or whether your idea for what would be a good

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new widget is right you care about is my portfolio

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generating income and my getting a return on my investment? Because ultimately what you're doing is lending money to a company. If you're talking about the public stock market

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in exchange for a future profit, and that profit should exceed what I currently put to that

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portfolio.

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So

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at the origination phase, this is where those financial skills become so vital because

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everybody, not everybody, but most people are married to their ideas. If they're the one that put that idea into the idea of funnel, it's because they believe in it

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and they want to see it come to execution.

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But part of that origination phase is looking at it from a investment mindset and saying, Well, yes, this is a good idea is a good idea, but idea B is equally good idea, and it has a greater return on our investment. So where we would be better off as an organization

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putting our money in tow idea be

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regardless of how cool I d a idea A is.

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So then you get into was called Project Initiation. So you've got your idea. You've done a business case very high level, looked at r. A. Y very high level, and now you've decided that at a minimum it's worth doing the research to see whether this is a viable project.

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So from this point forward, you're gonna hear a lot of terms like progressively

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elaborate or, uh,

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interpretive development thing, that nature. And basically what it's saying is, you know, at this point in the project, we don't know who's gonna be programming widget, eh?

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Or who's what Color button B is gonna be.

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That's way too early on. But what we're looking at is let's start looking at

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the risk, the complexity of the project. Let's develop that project charm that we talked about in the previous video.

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Get that toe where everybody's in agreement so that that, very importantly, they will sign the project charter again, going back to the Iron Triangle, going back to the driver week and strength.

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It's the most challenging thing that I've ever personally had to face in. Project Management is getting a sponsor to sign a project charter and agree in writing

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that this is the least flexible.

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This is the most flexible I have. The as the PM I have the ability to extend the schedule or spend more money or or

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bring in less of the performance requirements,

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and it's agreed to buy the sponsor. They want it to their to their defense. I mean, everybody wants they want all everything under the sun as much as they can get. They want their money destruct as far as it can.

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Part of the PM's job is to sort of be the brain on someone's parade a little bit and make sure that you get that information in the charter and everybody agrees to it ahead of time.

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So a project charter is the project's constitution, and at the enterprise level,

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we're talking about

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a Constitution in the sense of the U. S. Constitution, meaning

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that we have a formal requirement to change it. And what

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is part of that change process? We won't get into details about it right now, but what part of that process has to also be agreed upon

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during the Project charter creation phase so that nobody is surprised later on down the road, it governs the overall project objectives,

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So the project are does necessarily care how the sausage is made. But the Project charter cares what the sausages is gonna look like and what it has to be able to do at the tail end. And it really is used as a metric

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to determine whether the project was successful or not.

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When you hear terms like project failures go creeping that nature. What they're really saying is when compared to the Project Charter we did not achieve our objectives were solve our business case.

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So in summary,

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we talked about

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projects versus operations and different organizational

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requirements around both of those fields. And we talked about the beginning of the Project Life cycle. In the subsequent video, we will go in more detail about each of the phases of the project life cycle.