Is it possible to simultaneously use the process and project approaches, despite the belief that these are opposite methods of management?
Let’s start from standard definitions in our article:
- A business process is a sustainable, goal-oriented set of interrelated activities that transforms inputs into outputs of value to the customer (CBOK).
- A project is a temporary venture aimed at creating unique products, services, or outcomes (PMBOK).
The very definitions of the process and the project contain contradictions: the process is “repetitive” actions, and the project is actions that “create a unique result”, therefore, non-repetitive.
But there are a couple of nuances:
- In the world there is not only black and white, but also 50 shades of gray.
There are activities that are 100% business processes, for example: retail sales, typical purchases, cleaning of the territory, in-line production, etc. There are activities that are 100% projects, for example: design and construction of a unique bridge, preparation of a mission to Mars, etc.
At the same time, there exist and successfully develop types of activities, businesses and entire industries that have characteristics of both processes and projects – they are somewhere in the middle, or in the range from 20 to 80 on the Process-Project scale. The most prominent representatives of such “intermediate” activities are software construction and development.
The application and degree of implementation of a particular practice or methodology depends on the object: the construction of a unique bridge is a 100% project, the construction of another typical house is more of a process. By the way, the preparation of the one hundred and first mission to Mars will be closer to the process.
- The process approach and the project approach are just models of the real world (activity). And if an object in the real world has the properties of both models, then nothing prevents you from building both models for this object and using them.
Another interesting example is light. Scientists have long argued: is light a wave or particles? As a result of the disputes, it was realized that both the wave theory and the corpuscular theory are only models, and now light is considered as a flux of photons when calculating photoeffects and as a wave when calculating interference, diffraction, etc. This is called “wave-particle dualism.”