Lots of people confuse projects and operations and oftentimes they consider operations to be an ongoing project. 

But there's no such thing as an ongoing project.

I've had to explain this multiple times and if you work in project management, you'll have to do this a lot too so that you can set expectations on where your work starts and ends. 

The handover between the project and operations needs to be clarified even before you start with your project so that it's clear who's going to take over and when. 

But let's take a look at the differences between projects and operations so you get a better idea of what I'm talking about. 

What's a Project?

I'm a certified Project Management Professional by the PMI and their PMBOK guide defines projects as "a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result."

Projects are: 

• temporary - they have a definitive beginning and end
• unique - they are a new undertaking, unexplored ground

Projects are characterised by:

There's no doubt that organisational culture impacts the behaviour, values and practices of anybody working at that organisation. 

As a program manager, I've always thought of myself as a different type of leader who acts as a change agent to help create a positive organisational culture among my project or program team.  

But since I've always worked in an international environment and with multi-cultural teams, that's not always been easy. 

I've written about cultural differences before and they play a huge role in the success of any project or program. 

In fact, knowledge and awareness of cultural values can enable leaders and managers to effectively manage and work through intercultural conflict and interactions.

To learn more, I found a research a while ago performed by GLOBE that maps leadership within cultural groups around the world. 

The GLOBE research team defines leadership as the "ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organisations of which they are members."

The team found that members of different societies have differing expectations from their leaders that are influenced by their cultural values. They also identified leadership attributes that were culturally-endorsed.

When I was working at HubSpot, one of the most popular tools (if not the most popular) for project management was the DARCI model. 

It almost became synonymous with project management because it allowed to define who to work with and in what capacity when you needed to execute on a project or an initiative in an organisation that is quite complex when it comes to working cross-functionally.

But the DARCI framework is just a part of project management if you choose to use it. There's so much more to managing a project as I've covered previously so with this post I want to explain what the DARCI model is and give you my recommendation on how and when to use it. 

So what's DARCI in Project Management?

DARCI stands for Decision-Maker, Accountable, Responsible, Consulted and Informed.

There are other versions of it such as RACI which is what you'll find in PMI's PMBOK for project management. RACI is the same as DARCI but excludes the Decision-Maker.

In essence, the DARCI framework serves to identify the roles and responsibilities of a given project.

One of the most important areas of project management or any work that involves people for that matter is stakeholder management.

In fact, the main reason why projects fail is the lack of good stakeholder management.

There are a ton of tools you can use to identify your stakeholders and perform a stakeholder analysis. 

I've often used such tools not just to manage projects but also whenever I'd started a new position. It's hugely important to know who your main stakeholders are, who your supporters are, who the people that you can learn from are and who your potential challengers would be. You need to know how they tick, what's important to them, how they like to communicate and make decisions and how they like to work with others. 

Today, I want to show you a model for stakeholder analysis that I learned about when I was studying for the PMI certification. 

It's called the salience model and serves as a tool to define and analyse stakeholders for your project.

What is the Salience Model for Project Management?

We recently covered the different project management approaches, however, I thought it might be helpful to ensure that we have the fundamentals of project management discussed as well. 

As I was thinking about how to best do this, I didn't want to write a heavy 3,000-word piece so I decided to yet again use infographics as they're so easy to consume.

Today, we'll cover: 

• what is project management
• the 5 key project management process groups (or phases)
• and 8 important project management processes 

As you can see, I've become very passionate about project management. Next week, I'm taking the exam with the PMI to become a certified project management professional so you can expect a lot more on the topic over the coming weeks and months. 

Now let's get started. 

What is Project Management [Infographic]