What's a project?

Typically work falls into a couple of buckets: tasks and projects. Tasks might be things like writing blog posts, returning emails, scheduling and fulfilling orders, reviewing others' work, talking with customers. What do these things have in common? They’re recurring work you've encountered before, you know how to complete, and likely follow existing processes.

Projects are different. Projects are chunks of work that challenge you and your team to work outside the bounds of repeating tasks or processes. And recognizing when you need to treat work like a project rather than a task ensures you put the right resources and structure into place to get work done effectively. It's helpful to think of things that are a project when you need to take time to discover stakeholder expectations, define a project scope**,** and communicate project progress throughout work.

What does that mean in concrete terms? I define a project as meeting one or more of the following criteria (not all of these must be true for it to be a project!):

You're developing a new process that will be followed in future to accomplish tasks
You're creating a work product that requires contributions from more than one team
You're working towards a finite goal or deadline
You're working on requirements from folks outside of the team accomplishing the work

Asking yourself these questions can help clarify how to approach work.

Once you've identified that you have a project on your hands, what's next? It's helpful to get buy-in from other teams that they agree this work merits a project effort. I don't usually find this piece controversial; generally, folks will appreciate that you're seeking to clarify concrete requirements, resources, and timing. If you get pushback here, it's worth listening carefully to ensure you're not overcomplicating simple work.

If you're aligned with your colleagues on identifying a project, it's time to kick into your project discovery phase.

How to do project discovery right

There's a step a lot of folks skip between being assigned a project and kicking off work: project discovery. In the project discovery phase, you're like an investigator who's doing a background check for a project. You're figuring out why the project is needed, who's excited about it and who has concerns, and what's needed to get the project done well.

Thoroughly conducting project discovery will build buy-in with the folks on the project team and with folks impacted by your work, and ultimately prevent conflict and reduce mistakes in defining requirements and estimating needed resources. Let's walk through how to dig into the project from the beginning to avoid difficult surprises.

What's project discovery?

Projects aren't lists of tasks. Typically a stakeholder or leader will set out a goal for a project: an objective or business requirement that you're meeting by building a team to create new products, processes, or content and communication. Project discovery means establishing the purpose of the project and the stakeholder's vision for how it will be accomplished. This context will allow you to understand why a project is strategically important and help you make the right decisions or recommendations about project execution.

When you're assigned a project, you need to define three key pieces of information:

Goal: What elements do you need to produce or implement to call the project complete?
Strategic context: What are the business reasons for the project? What priority or growth strategy does this project support? Sometimes asking these questions can reveal that a project is not a high priority.