Projects have a peculiar ability to become the center of attention.
We establish plans, milestones, budgets, governance structures and reporting mechanisms. We monitor progress, manage risks and eventually determine whether the project succeeded.
Yet the organization rarely wanted a project in the first place.
It wanted something to change.
A testing improvement project exists to improve testing capability. A system replacement project exists to change a system or product. A transformation programme exists to develop organizational capabilities.
The project exists in service of that change.
But this raises an interesting distinction.
The Project Is a Subject Too
A project can itself be understood as a subject.
It has boundaries, responsibilities, capabilities and characteristics that can be assessed and improved.
There is nothing wrong with managing a project as a subject.
The problem arises when we confuse it with the subject it exists to change.
Consider a system replacement project.
The project is one subject: a temporary organization coordinating change.
The system being replaced is another. The organizational capability depending on that system may be a third.
Each can be understood, developed and assessed.
But evidence about one does not necessarily tell us much about the others.
Two Different Claims of Success
Suppose a project finishes on schedule, within budget and with all agreed deliverables accepted.
That is meaningful evidence about the project.
But has the intended change occurred?
Does the new system deliver the expected outcomes? Has the organizational capability improved? Have the risks that motivated the project been reduced?
Those are different questions requiring different evidence.
The difficulty is that project performance is often easier to observe than the effects of the change.
Milestones can be counted. Deliverables can be accepted. Activities can be marked complete.
Capability development and organizational outcomes are harder to assess.
So the visible subject can gradually substitute for the important one.
A training programme is completed, so competence is assumed to have improved.
A process is implemented, so behaviour is assumed to have changed.
A system goes live, so the transformation is considered successful.
But completing an intervention is not evidence that it achieved its intended effect.
The Project as an Intervention
Seen from the perspective of the subject being changed, the project is a temporary mechanism for coordinating interventions.
It may introduce technologies, practices, roles, structures or governance arrangements intended to move another subject toward a desired state.
The project therefore contains an implicit hypothesis:
If we perform these interventions, we expect the subject to change in these ways.
The project plan describes what we currently believe is necessary to produce that change.
But what happens when an intervention is completed and the expected effect does not appear?
Simply completing the remaining activities more efficiently may not help.
The evidence may be telling us that our understanding of the subject, or of how to change it, was incomplete.
The ability to adjust the interventions then becomes more important than adherence to the original plan.
The Temporary and the Continuing Subject
There is another complication.
Projects are deliberately temporary.
We create them with the intention of eventually dismantling them.
Project teams dissolve. Governance structures disappear. Budgets close. Responsibilities are transferred.
But the subject being changed may need to continue for decades.
During the project, considerable understanding accumulates within the temporary organization.
People learn why decisions were made, which alternatives were rejected, what assumptions proved incorrect and where uncertainty remains.
What happens to that understanding when the project disappears?
Traditional handover often concentrates on transferring deliverables, documentation and operational responsibilities.
But continuity requires more than possession of artifacts.
Can those who inherit the subject understand why it is the way it is?
Do they know what outcomes were intended, which assumptions shaped the solution and what remains uncertain?
Can they continue assessing and developing the subject without depending on the people who participated in the project?
A project may successfully deliver a new realization while leaving the organization poorly equipped to understand or evolve it.
The project is supposed to disappear. The understanding required to continue the subject should not disappear with it.
What Does Project Completion Mean?
Perhaps project completion deserves a broader interpretation.
We need evidence that the project has been managed effectively.
We need different evidence that the intended change has occurred.
And we need confidence that the organization can continue managing and developing the changed subject after the project has ended.
The project doesn’t need to preserve itself.
Its temporary structures can disappear.
But the understanding, responsibility and ability to learn must continue somewhere.
Because the project is not the subject of the change.
It is the temporary subject responsible for helping another subject become something different — and remain capable of evolving afterward.
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