The Anatomy and Physiology of Projects

There are many ways to approach project planning. Here’s a very basic but useful framework. (If you look closely, you’ll see the influence of Aristotle’s theory of aitiai, sometimes inaccurately translated as the Four Causes.)

Projects are activities that have a beginning, middle, and end, which distinguishes projects from ongoing processes (which may nevertheless be composed of discrete projects.) Projects have these elements:

• a goal (outcomes)
• methods, guiding values, and other parameters for action (e.g., ARs, college policy, etc.)
• required resources (everything needed to accomplish the goal, including materials, labor, etc.)
• people who get it done

To this list of elements, I would add project assessment, which Aristotle surely would have included under the heading of practical reason. The point of a project is to achieve a more-or-less specific goal, and so the most rudimentary form of assessment is required just to know when a project can end!

Assessment should be built into a project from the ground up. For instance, when setting the goal and objectives, teams should define what a success will look like (metrics, characteristics, etc.). Assessment of purposeful activity is a necessary condition of striving for excellence.

If you look at a project in terms of agency, that is from the perspective of implementation, you find these functions:

• process owner: Who is accountable for the project?
  • The process owner must articulate the rationale and goal of the project, articulates parameters such as guiding values and the timelines, and ensures that roles are assigned (e.g, facilitator, implementer, assessor). In other words, the process owner is responsible for articulating What is to be accomplished, How, When, and Who of a project.
• process facilitator: Who supports those who own and implement the project?
  • A project facilitator contributes to progress by structuring the circumstances, materials, and actors within the parameters of the guiding principles and values. A very basic example of the facilitator function is the person who reserves a room and media for a working meeting, ensures that the materials needed at the working meeting are available and in good order, etc.
  • A humorous way to phrase this function: Who does the work required to get the work done?
• process implementer: Who does the actual “work” and brings the project to completion?
  • For projects of more than small proportions, there may be multiple implementers working together. The essential character of the implementer is that their work moves the project forward toward the goal, within the stipulated parameters.
• process assessor: Who decides what counts as success and which methodologies to use to make that assessment?
  • In practice, the process assessor is often the same person as one of the other roles. However, the assessment function is distinct, and clarity about that function often helps make a project more efficient and of higher quality. This is because standards of excellence are different than a standard of completion. Think of singing a song: The criteria by which we determine when the song has ended are different than the criteria by which we judge the overall performance.

In many cases, two or more functions are combined in one person. How many times have you been the process owner, the person who did the work, and the person who did the work required to get the work done?

Further, complex projects may have “sub-projects,” each of which should have an identified process owner, facilitator, implementer, and assessor. Think of complex projects as nests of interdependent sub-projects: Only when the component projects have successfully been completed and integrated at the next higher level of organization, can we say that the overall project is moving forward.

Let’s take a simplified example: Suppose I am process owner for a project that includes three sub-projects. Sub-project C cannot be completed until sub-project B, because the “product” of B is required to move C forward. Sub-project A is relatively independent of B and C. As process owner for the whole, I must include in the charter explicit parameters for integrating the sub-projects — and an additional task of the assessor is to include assessment of the integration of sub-projects. Assessment of both the product and the process of moving a project forward is a necessary in striving for excellence. Think of learning a music instrument: the path to excellence lies not only in attending to what you are practicing, but also to how you are practicing the instrument. Learning to practice in productive ways is a part of the journey.

When you are working on a project, analyze the project in terms of these elements and roles, and ensure that you have all the function bases covered (especially if you are the process owner!).

When a group collaborates on a project without explicitly specifying roles, people will generally gravitate to roles that they find comfortable, but mostly unreflectively. This can lead to a lack of direction, inefficient use of people’s time and energy, and conflict. People are typically less anxious when the roles are explicitly discussed, and that actually frees energy that can be channeled into excellence.

Clearly defining the roles and giving people opportunities to review and discuss their roles is an essential part of striving for excellence — and it is a responsibility of the process owner to facilitate that discussion and review. Remember: To get better, one must practice a musical instrument in a disciplined, self-conscious, methodical way.

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Where’s the Aristotle, you ask? Well, for a start, Aristotle refers to a processes with a beginning, middle, and end as kinesis (or metabole), and he discusses such processes in books like Physics IV and here and there in the Metaphysics. His theory of aitiai is also elaborated in various places (notably in the Posterior Analytics, Physics, and Metaphysics). Briefly (and somewhat inaccurately), the four “causes” are:

• final: the “for the sake of which” a process or entity exists; the “aim” or terminus; a good word for this is End. (When activity is consciously directed by practical reason, we could call it the end-in-view.)
• formal: the essence that explains the being of the process or entity (the “what it is to be” that thing). The formal cause is a collection of necessary traits for a being to be the particular “thing” it is. Think about me: There is a set of necessary traits that “define” my Matthewness.
• material: this is the subject (think: subjectmatter) of an entity or process; the “stuff” that is “informed” by the activity of the doer or maker)
• efficient: the doer or maker of a process or entity; this is the thing or person that moves a process forward toward a goal.

In beings that have the capacity of practical reason — in other words, in beings capable of self-determined activity (unlike rocks that change because of external forces or organisms impelled to act on inborn impulses), the final and formal causes play a special role in determining the excellence or arete of an activity. (Arete is often misleadingly translated “virtue,” but it actually means excellence.) Think of the difference between a beautiful sound made by the wind in the trees, versus the beautiful sound made by a really, really good classical guitarist. The former is a result not of consciously directed activity, but by a natural process. The latter is clearly a case of conscious, self-directed activity toward an end-in-view, namely getting really, really good at playing the guitar.

This means that an agent can aim at the excellence of a process — which also means that the agent can both fail to achieve the goal of an activity and fail to achieve excellence, for a variety of reasons.

More on excellence another time.