In the age of ultra-modern and advanced technology, there are still a lot of unsolved puzzles:
What is the start and the end of the sky?
What is the starting point of a circle?
Which came first? The chicken or the egg?
Few claim that they did solve the mystery and many oppose contradicting the former’s claims and the explanations.
While thinking of some of those puzzles, something intriguing came to my mind. Parking the complicated ones aside, can we get a unanimous answer to the question-“What came first? Is it the Service OR the project??” I really doubt If we can.
When did the first ever services begin?
When did the first ever project begin or when did it end?
I gave a lot of thought in figuring out what the answer could be and failed to understand whether I was able to arrive at the correct answer or no!! And thus, I have convinced myself saying – it is as complicated as the chicken and egg story.
One of the many similar definitions of a service is: ‘the action of helping or doing work for someone’
One of the many similar definitions of a project is: ‘It is an individual or collaborative enterprise that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim’
Origin of service or Project – If we consider the above definitions of a service or project, it’s difficult to think of the origin of the service, as we have to keep going to the ages, but still wouldn’t be able to find the root.
The outcome of the project should cater to some need or requirement. A project should bring some change or be able to address am existing challenge.
Sometimes, Projects may trigger services and on other times services may trigger projects.
The outcome of the project mostly gets delivered as a service. In that way, both of them look inter-related and very much inter-twined.
Examples of services:
It can be running a cab service or running a restaurant.
Examples of projects:
It can vary from running an ad campaign for the promotion of your cab service, or introducing a new theme in the restaurant and updating it periodically.
In most of the cases, a service either starts with a new project, or as an outcome of an old project.
If we consider an example of a Restaurant , the objective is to get into the hospitality industry but that cannot happen until unless we have a project of how to do so.
We can also say that it is an iteration of Project to service, service to project, and so on.
One thing is clear- we may not be able to arrive a definite answer unless we have a defined starting point. Let’s say we want to venture into a business which should help us deliver some value to the customers. We hit the market with a product, which is surely an outcome of a project.
In this case, we have defined beforehand that we will start with a project before we get into service.
Let us take it the other way round. You are already into a business where you provide maintenance and support services for something existing from other sources and would like to improve the way everything is going. You may want to change the way the things are done currently. That so called change could also be a project.
In this case, we were into service but got into a project after the need triggered us to do so.
Relating it to IT, services, and projects as part of our job roles, we will not find a service without a finished product/outcome which is delivered as a service. While we are in services industry, we ought to introduce new projects whenever we want to introduce a new enhancement or a modification to some existing ones. It makes them mostly coexistent and get overlapped very often.
Overall, to know which came first may not be of utmost importance, BUT understanding and realizing the dependency on each other would definitely help us take better and up to date decisions.
It can always be beneficial that the project manager has a clue of how the outcome of his project is getting delivered as a service, how it’s adding value to the end users, and at the same time the service manager also should have a clue about how the project is shaping up, without getting the end value deviated.
Relating all this to our IT industry, this is something our veteran experts might have realized long time back. Result of the same is that we have n number of Industry best practice frameworks and methodologies like ITIL, PMBOK, Agile, Lean Six sigma, COBIT, TOGAF, ISO, etc. We also know the value being generated by the permutation and combination of the best practices available.
I believe this is the reason; many job descriptions for role of a Project Manager clearly state that it is desirable if the candidate has good understanding of the service management and vice versa. A project manager with only project management knowledge is no longer weighed same compared to someone who has a mix of different skills. In this competitive world of opportunities, it became vital that we upgrade our skills constantly and evolve as per the trends in the industry. For whatever role we are getting into, it is very important that we understand all the other related components to gain an edge over others. This not only helps people on the individual front but also the organizations and the customers we are associated with.