What is a Project?

Well according to Wikipedia a project is...in business and science is a collaborative enterprise, frequently involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim

I describe a project as...

an assignment in which a number of activities are required to achieve a goal or purpose.

A project could be...rolling out a new version of MS Office for example. You'd need to consider
-How many users this needs to go to.
-How long have you got to roll it out? When do you need to have it out by?
-How are you going to hit everyone?
-Have you got special cases you need to consider or does everyone work at a desk in an office?
-What will you do for communications?
-Is any testing required? Will rolling this out affect any of your other apps you have out in the workforce?
-Who are the stakeholders(the important people) in this project?
-What does a successful rollout look like (Quality)? How will you measure this?
-what are the risks? How will you mitigate these?
-Can you afford to to do this? Does it make business sense?

For a rollout project, these and perhaps more questions would be considered and would be used to formulate a plan to work to.

When people ask what is the difference between Project Management and Programmme Management i usually say...

A programme is a collection of projects. The different projects contribute to the goal of the programme. Say for example, you have a large multinational company, thousands of users, thousands of different types of computers, different operating systems, different pieces of software, different processes, different services....different 3rd party service contracts.....different different different. The programme is called "G-1" - GATHER-1. The goal of the programme is to reduce IT costs. This will be achieved by consolodating all computers to a single type, all service contracts to a single provider (or may be just a handle or even a couple)...a single operating system for all computer....and so on.

As you can imagine, you couldnt simply do this as just one FAT project. You'd break all of these down into smaller chunks. So one project would be "workstation consolidation", another would be perhaps UHD...Universal Help Desk...and so on.... All of these sum up to the objects of the programme. You would have one person at the top - The Programme Manager looking after this, making sure things are running in the right direction....but he would have a number of Project Managers underneath him running these different workstreams.