The Difference Between Project Management And Operations Management

What’s the difference between project management and operations management?

I get this question fairly often, many people get confused what’s the difference, even though the difference between them is so clear. This is possibly because they share some characteristics, such as:

• both are performed by people,
• both are planned, executed and controlled, and
• both have resource limitation

In this short article, I will explain the difference between project management and operations management and that in any organization, only two aspects of work exist – on-going operations and projects

Project Management

Projects are unique, temporary tasks with a specific beginning and end.

Project management is the organizational functions, to initiate projects for a variety of reasons, such as to meet a business need, attain a strategic objective or meet a market demand. projects are temporary and help the business to meet organisational goals and to respond quickly and easily to the external environment.

Resources are assigned temporarily to projects that have an start and end date. Organisations use projects to change operations, products and services to meet business need, gain competitive advantage or/and respond to new markets.

PMBOK Guide defines the project as – “A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result.”

PRINCE2 defines the project as – “A project is a temporary organization that is created for the purpose of delivering one or more business products according to an agreed Business Case.”

Operations Management

Operations constitute an organization’s on-going, repetitive activities, Operations Management is the ongoing organisational function performing the activity of providing IT service management or accounting operations.

Resources are assigned to do the same tasks according to operating procedures and policy. IT operations, are the set of all processes and services that are both provisioned by an IT staff to their internal or external clients and used by themselves, to run themselves as a business.

• Project Manager
• Role ends with project
• Temporary team
• Many different skills
• Work not done before
• Time, cost and scope constraints
• Difficult to estimate time and budget

• Operational Manager
• Routine
• Stable organisation
• Specialist skills
• Work repeatable
• Annual planning cycle
• Budgets set and fixed events

I am really proud to be part of Project Management