Projects vs Operations

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Designed to help those that are preparing to take the PMP or CAPM Certification Exam, each post within this series presents a comparison of common concepts that appear on the PMP and CAPM exams.

Projects vs Operations

Work completed by an organization could be considered either operations or projects. Given that the PMP and CAPM exams are testing your knowledge of project management, the difference between projects and operations should be recognized.

Projects

According to PMI’s PMBOK^® Guide, a project is “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result”.

Using that definition, a project is temporary in nature, having a defined start and end date, and produces a unique output. Projects are conducted as a means to obtain the organization’s strategic objectives and are considered above and beyond normal organizational operations.

Operations

Operations, however, are the ongoing, routine activities that are involved in the organization’s primary business. This is the “keeping-the-lights-on” work, such as staffing management, payroll, product production, service delivery, etc. As such, operations includes all of the “normal” business functions.

Example

Here at Passionate Project Management, our daily student management, writing blog posts, ordering course materials, paying the bills, and changing the toner in the copier, are part of our operations.

However, each time we develop a new training course, such as our PMI-ACP (Agile Practitioner) boot camp, we are working on a project: We plan our approach, gather experts, develop the course materials and exercises, and add the course to our class calendar .

Once the class has launched, it will be managed through operations.

Summary

Both projects and operations are:

However projects:

Whereas operations:

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