Purpose of Paper
Projects are processes for conducting work that produces a new product of
one sort or another. The better we can understand these processes, the better
we should be able to educate project mangers and their teams. The better educated
the project managers and their teams that we have, the higher the project success
rating we should be able to achieve. For this, we need to know how these processes
may be linked to a particular type of product, and what the implications are
for project management.
To commence this journey, we need a suitable basis for classifying projects.
To this end, we believe that it is necessary to look beyond a projectÍs nominal
category or sponsoring industry and look at the fundamentally different types
of work involved. Most projects encompass more than one type of work, so we
must look at the major work elements (work packages) and their immediate products.
Our basic premise is simple — For a project to be successful, different types
of project work, associated with different types of product, need to be managed
differently.
In other words, management style, strategy, tools, processes and people should
all be adapted to the specific type of project. The purpose of this paper, then,
is to identify fundamentally different types of project from the perspective
of selecting appropriate styles of management.
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Introduction
