I am a Business Analyst for a Finance Department that has realized significant improvement in process, often through technology enhancements / projects.
I'm seeking feedback on how various PMs or organizations define Small, Medium, or Large projects.
I would consider a large project at least anything that extends over 1 year, perhaps even 6 months.
Additionally, I consider Baseline break/fix efforts as a separate group.
Please let me know how your organizations classifies projects. Saving Changes...
For my team, timeline does not define the size, but is viewed rather as a either a luxury or an issue depending on whether or not it is sufficient or insufficient. the size of the project, for us, is based on the scope of what we are trying to do technicaly, how much equipment, how many sites, how many parties,what are the expectations, etc. I've had complete system refresh projects, which while they included lots of equipment, and the construction of an entirely new network, it was deemed small, to medium. This was due to the fact that a single Sr. Security Eng. was able to set up the new system during normal business hours, about 40 of them, then conduct a fairly routine cutover on Friday night. Another project, which only involved upgrading a High Availability Firewall, was deemed somewhat large, as the customer could not have ANY downtime due to customer contract obligations, while they had failed to maintain Licenses, support, or update subscriptions for almost 4 years! How we achieved this was truely magical but that is why we are so good. >:^) In summary, sales may consider a project huge, where as my team may not. In those cases we consider them, strategic or valuable but not necessarily large. By contrast, they might be selling us on something they believe to be small only to find out that it is far more complex, and therefore demanding for us. Saving Changes...
Ed ParazooSr Consultant| Understandable SolutionsKettle Falls, Wa, United States
Michael, as you might guess - this topic is wide open and each person will define a project's "size" differently. For me, the size label of a project depends on your specific environment. In a prior company, I too concidered a project over 9 months to be a large one. That was until I was assigned to manage several projects at the same time - all utilizing the same resources. More of a coordination effort - these projects would have been small to medium to me but they shared resources between them which effectively streached them beyond that magical 6 or 9 month boundary! Bingo is it now a large project just because I don't have dedicated resources? I think not. For my current company a large project might be upgrading a software package -- only requiring IT to "work" for an evening or weekend -- but getting to that - the coordination takes time and scheduling spanning a couple of months. For them - this is a large project (to me it would be small). No real clear cut definition. It all depends on your company or department and the impact. Saving Changes...
George JucanManaging Partner| Organizational Perfomance Enablers NetworkWoodbridge, Ontario, Canada
Michael, based on my experience when a project is assessed for “size”, there are usually considered one or more of these 3 factors: budget, time and resources. The limits for “big”, “medium” and “small” are definitely dependent of the organization – a 1 mil. project might be small for a software powerhouse but definitely big for the corner auto shop retooling its painting chamber.
However, from a project management perspective I personally find more significance in a project “complexity” factor. A project could be “big”, but also “simple” – a project manager should be able to manage couple “simple” projects (even “big”) in the same time, but might want to dedicate full attention to a “complex” project (even if “small”).
The complexity assessment I’m using takes in account all classic PM knowledge areas (Scope, Time / Schedule, Cost / Budget, Quality, Human Resources, Communication, Risk, Procurement) and it’s customizable for each company. It was accepted for publishing by gantthead so it should appear soon on this site, together with the tool to visually present it to executives.
Once something has been determined to be a project there are numerous ways to size it but take the question back one place. How do you define a project, differentiate between a 'project' and say repetative operational work.
ie what would be a dictionary style definition of a project suitable to provide to management for determining what constitutes a project and thus should use some form of Project Management approach.
Saving Changes...
