Project Management Basics

Projects and operations

A project is a temporary effort to create a unique product, service or result. Temporary means it has a defined start and end; unique means it has not been done in exactly this way before; and it has a defined outcome against which success can be judged.

Operations are the opposite: ongoing, repetitive work that keeps an existing service running. At Kestrel Energy the two sit side by side:

The boundary matters most at the end: a project that "goes live" without the service desk trained or monitoring in place hands its problems to operations. The ITSM topic describes that handover in PRINCE2 and project management.

Project management

Project management is applying knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to a project so that it delivers its intended outcome within its constraints. In practice that means agreeing what the project must achieve, planning the work, organizing people and money, tracking progress, managing risks and changes, and closing the project properly.

Project management is not the same as using a particular method. A Scrum team managing its own work, a project manager with a detailed schedule and a Kanban team tracking flow are all managing work; they differ in how much they decide up front and who decides.

The triple constraint

The triple constraint, also called the iron triangle, says that scope (what is delivered), time (when) and cost (with what budget and people) are linked: change one and at least one of the others must change too, or quality suffers. Quality is often drawn in the middle of the triangle because it is what gets squeezed silently when the three corners are fixed and the work grows.

The triangle is usually traced to the British engineer Martin Barnes around 1969, although the attribution is not certain, and modern guidance such as the PMBOK Guide talks about many competing constraints (risk, resources, sustainability) rather than three. The simple version is still useful, because it forces an honest question: which of these is allowed to move?

Project scope and scope creep

Project scope is the work that must be done, and the deliverables that must be produced, to deliver the project's result — and, just as important, what is explicitly out of scope. For the portal relaunch, "customers can view bills and submit meter readings" might be in scope; "a new mobile app" might be explicitly out.

Scope creep is the uncontrolled growth of scope without matching changes to time, cost or resources: small additions ("while you're at it, can we also…") accepted one by one, each harmless on its own, until the project is late and over budget. The cure is not to refuse every change, but to make each change visible and decide it consciously, with its effect on time and cost on the table.

Stakeholders and roles

Every project has stakeholders: people or groups who affect or are affected by it — customers, users, the service desk, finance, regulators, suppliers. Identifying them early, understanding their interest and influence, and keeping them informed is covered in Stakeholders, Risk and Communication.

Three roles appear in almost every project:

Scrum has no project manager. Its three accountabilities — Product Owner, Scrum Master and Developers — split those duties differently; see The Scrum Team.

The project lifecycle

A project lifecycle is the series of phases a project passes through from start to finish. Classic project management guidance groups the management work into five process groups:

1. Initiating — define the project at a high level, confirm the business case, appoint a sponsor and project manager, get authorization to start.
2. Planning — work out scope, schedule, budget, risks, communication and quality in enough detail to start.
3. Executing — do the work and produce the deliverables.
4. Monitoring and controlling — compare progress with the plan, handle changes and issues, correct course. This runs alongside the other groups, not after them.
5. Closing — hand over the result, release the team, record lessons learned, formally end the project.

These are groups of management activities, not strictly sequential phases: planning continues during execution, and a large project cycles through them per phase. The PMBOK Guide – Eighth Edition (November 2025) brings these five back as "focus areas" with roughly forty processes mapped to them, presented as non-prescriptive guidance alongside its principles and performance domains (see PMBOK Guide).

Predictive, adaptive and hybrid

Projects differ in how much can be known up front, and so in how they are planned. Three broad approaches are recognized:

• A predictive approach defines scope, schedule and cost early in the project and then delivers against that plan, controlling changes formally. It is often called "waterfall" or "plan-driven".
• An adaptive approach plans in short cycles, delivers usable increments frequently and adjusts scope based on feedback. Agile frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban are adaptive.
• A hybrid approach combines elements of both — for example a predictive plan for hardware and contracts with adaptive delivery of the software on top.

Neither approach is better in general. Predictive planning is efficient when the work is well understood; adaptive planning protects you when it is not. The details are on Predictive Planning and Choosing an Approach.

Success criteria

"On time and on budget" is the traditional measure, but a project can meet both and still fail — a portal delivered on schedule that customers do not use has wasted its budget. Agree success criteria at initiation, and include outcomes, not only outputs:

Output     New portal live for all residential customers by 1 March
Budget     Within EUR 480,000, including a 10% contingency
Outcome    Calls to the service desk about bills down 25% within 3 months
Outcome    At least 60% of meter readings submitted online by month 6
Quality    No critical accessibility findings (WCAG 2.2 AA) at go-live

Outcome criteria like these connect a project to critical success factors and key performance indicators that operations will keep measuring after the project closes.

PMBOK Guide and PRINCE2 at a glance

Two bodies of guidance dominate project management, and you will meet both:

• The PMBOK Guide from the Project Management Institute (PMI), a key reference for PMI certifications such as the PMP and CAPM, whose exams follow their own content outlines. Its eighth edition (November 2025) is built on six principles and seven performance domains and supports predictive, adaptive and hybrid work.
• PRINCE2, owned by PeopleCert and widespread in the UK, the Netherlands and the public sector. It manages a project by stages with a clear business justification throughout; the current edition is PRINCE2 7 (2023). PRINCE2 Agile combines it with agile delivery.

Both are covered in more depth on Choosing an Approach.