Project Management for Trainers: Stop "Winging It" and Get Control of Your Training Projects

What Is a Project?

The best place to start is to clearly define what you mean by project. It may seem obvious, but it often isn’t. A project has a distinct beginning and end. For example, developing a new course is a project. You start it on a particular day, and on another day, the course is implemented and someone learns from it (you hope). Of course, an ongoing set of activities may maintain and enhance this course as it lives its useful life—those activities constitute a maintenance process, not a project. Ongoing activities without a specific end point are called processes. The lists below illustrate the differences between the two types of activities:

Project	Process
Creation of a one-day workshop	Mentoring an employee
Creation of a Web-based ...