Today a project is any organized (that is, with a clear distribution of labor and capital) effort of some team (organizational unit) to achieve a goal, including the goal of enabling the life cycle (conception, creation, operation, elimination) of the System-of-Interest. The word “project” today is not associated only with the understanding of the project in the project management associations Project Management Institute (PMI), PRINCE2 or similar. Thus, a project will be called a case for fixing a leaking toilet in an office, and a three-month SCRUM-run in which no Gantt chart was built at all (but with the issue a month after the start of the minimum viable product/MVP, a couple of weeks later the second version of this MVP, and then a week later, with a steep pivot with a complete correspondence of the product). And even some singer from some producer (while the singer herself in the “project” can be easily replaced with one another without renaming the project). And even programs from classical project management (that is, many classic projects generated as the need for them is realized) are also often called a “project” today.
Sometimes, even instead of “project management”, they just talk about “operations management” and “task management”. Please do not confuse project management in its classic form. But this would be “project management” and “task management in projects”, where the word “project” would simply mean some work of the organizational unit to achieve some goal, not necessarily using the body of knowledge of project management in the classical sense.
You have to consider the blurry difference between project and design. Usually, the product is a realization of the System-of-Interest in its environment, and the project is an enabling system of this product, an organizational unit (organized for the creation and modification of the product by a group of people). But there is a variant when the product is the realization of the System-of-Interest in its environment, and the design is the system definition of that product. Sometimes these meanings can be somehow separated if you pay attention to the verbs: “a house project” will often be “design”, and “project to create a house” will be “project”.
The project system diagram specifies the alphas whose state must be reliably kept in mind throughout the project as the activity of some organizational unit, regardless of the method of operations management chosen—the scheme is not only applicable to classical project management. Even if you choose to manage the work using process management or case management practices, we will still be talking about the project.
Reminder: “James, while John had had “had had”, had had “had”; “had had” had had a better effect on the teacher”. Language copes with homonymy. The same term can mean completely different concepts. Be aware of the types of concepts (develop “typed thinking”), and you won’t get confused!
*An excerpt from “Methodology” course