Project

In contemporary business and science, a project is an individual or collaborative enterprise, possibly involving research or design, that is carefully planned, usually by the project assigned team, to achieve a particular aim.

One can also define a project as a set of interrelated tasks to be executed over a fixed period and within certain cost and other limitations.

One can view projects as temporary (rather than permanent) social systems or as work systems that are constituted by teams within or across organizations to accomplish particular tasks under time constraints. An ongoing project is usually called (or evolves into) a program.

The word project comes from the Latin word projectum from the Latin verb proicere, "before an action" which in turn comes from pro-, which denotes precedence, something that comes before something else in time (paralleling the Greek πρό) and iacere, "to do". The word "project" thus actually originally meant "before an action".

When the English language initially adopted the word, it referred to a plan of something, not to the act of actually carrying this plan out. Something performed in accordance with a project became known as an "object". Every project has certain phases of development.

At schools, educational institutes and universities, a project is a research assignment - given to a student - which generally requires a larger amount of effort and more independent work than that involved in a normal essay assignment. It requires students to undertake their own fact-finding and analysis, either from library/internet research or from gathering data empirically. The written report that comes from the project is usually in the form of an dissertation, which will contain sections on the project's inception, analysis, findings and conclusions...

In project management a project consists of a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. Another definition is: a management environment that is created for the purpose of delivering one or more business products according to a specified business case.

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