Project Management
A key takeaway from this article is that "the purpose of operations is to keep the organization functioning while the purpose of a project is to meet its goals and conclude. Therefore, operations are ongoing while projects are unique and temporary". Why is this such an important distinction? Projects have a beginning and an end. Operations always hum along in the background while everyone else works on projects. Which category does BI fit into? What does the BI analyst do? List up to 10 activities. Which of these consists of persistent monitoring? Maybe there is an aspect the business decision-makers want to observe daily, weekly, or monthly. This could be production levels, hiring rates, training costs, or anything else. These would be considered operational activities. These are normally almost fully automated via dashboards with little input from the analyst once the program is set to run. There may be some analytic process you add before you submit the regular report, but you are not creating something unique and new. If this is all a firm uses its BI capacity for, it wastes a valuable resource that should be constantly put to work on long- and short-term projects to answer strategic-level questions.
Project Management Overview
The starting point in discussing how projects should be properly managed is to first understand what a project is and, just as importantly, what it is not.
People have been undertaking projects since the earliest days of organized human activity. The hunting parties of our prehistoric ancestors were projects, for example; they were temporary undertakings directed at the goal of obtaining meat for the community. Large complex projects have also been with us for a long time. The pyramids and the Great Wall of China were in their day of roughly the same dimensions as the Apollo project to send men to the moon. We use the term "project" frequently in our daily conversations. A husband, for example may tell his wife, "My main project for this weekend is to straighten out the garage". Going hunting, building pyramids, and fixing faucets all share certain features that make them projects.
Source: Adrienne Watt, https://opentextbc.ca/projectmanagement/chapter/chapter-2-what-is-a-project-project-management/
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