what is a project before answering that it might be best to say what a project is not a project is not those everyday tasks which you do at work such as answering the phone making coffee replying to emails or writing reports for your boss it's not even those regular meetings you have every week with your colleagues none of these are projects they're what we call business as usual business as usual refers to all those everyday ongoing normal activities which keep your organization up and running think of a typical commercial organization it's usually structured in two different functional units or if you work for the government you'll work in one of its departments whichever business unit or department you work in your work usually has a narrow focus so if you work in a sales department your job is all about increasing the sales in your organization if you work in IT your job will be to maintain the IT systems in your organization so that's what we mean by business as usual now what about projects let's start by looking at some examples of projects developing a new smartphone is a project designing and running a marketing campaign is a project improving the business-as-usual processes and procedures is a project a wedding is a project so is moving into a new house what characteristics do all these projects share and what makes them different from business as usual well all your projects have a start date and an end date which means they're temporary even though sometimes projects are late they will stop at some point if the work doesn't stop it means the work isn't a project it's actually business as usual your projects also bring about changes to business as usual your projects do this by creating outputs which will be used by business as usual to bring about these changes one such output might be a new product to bring to market this might require new support and sales processes within your organization all the outputs might be improvements in the way you do business as usual such as making your business processes more efficient for example moving from a paper-based system to an automated system another characteristic of your projects is that they're always unique even though your projects might be similar to one another they always produce different results every time your projects will also probably be cross-functional if your organization is large projects are often global in scale for example rolling out a new email system for your organization across the globe is infinitely more complex than rolling it out just within one small department in one country the final characteristic of your projects relates to risk risk is all about uncertainty the things that might go wrong on your projects for example that new phone you're developing what if nobody ends up buying it projects are always inherently more risky than business as usual because on projects you're often doing things for the first time whereas when you do business as usual you're usually just repeating all the normal everyday work so we've now looked at the characteristics of both business as usual and projects