The use of projects as a deliberate mechanism for achieving complex goals can be traced back to the work of the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the 1950s. At the time, projects were adopted as a specialised and structured approach to delivering outcomes that could not be achieved through routine operational work. Since then, projects have transcended both geography and sector. Today, they are no longer an exception but a dominant business model for goal achievement across industries and countries alike.
It is now widely accepted that any meaningful definition of a project must, at a minimum, engage with the so-called triple constraints. These comprise scope—what must be delivered and the quality standard to which it must conform; time—the period within which delivery must occur; and budget—the resources that must be expended to deliver the agreed scope within the specified timeframe. Together, these constraints form the foundational logic through which projects are planned, governed, and evaluated.
Beyond the triple constraints, projects are often characterised by the uniqueness of their intended outcome, whether that outcome takes the form of a product, service, result, or newly developed capability. This element of uniqueness is frequently associated with creativity and innovation. In turn, creativity introduces uncertainty, and uncertainty gives rise to risk—both of which have traditionally been treated as defining features of projects.
However, this reliance on novelty and uncertainty as core identifiers of a project is not without critique. One such critique challenges the assumption that innovation and unpredictability are necessary conditions for something to qualify as a project. From this perspective, defining projects primarily by their novelty creates two conceptual problems.
The first is an identity problem. If a project can only be definitively identified after the fact—once uncertainty has materialised or innovation has been demonstrated—then classification becomes retrospective. In practical terms, this suggests that an initiative can only be labelled a project once it has already unfolded, which undermines the usefulness of the definition in guiding decision-making upfront.
The second is a novelty problem. By insisting that projects must be innovative and uncertain by nature, this view risks excluding legitimate undertakings that are clearly bounded by scope, time, and budget but are not inherently novel. In reality, many projects involve repeatable or well-understood work, yet still require disciplined project governance to succeed.
To address these shortcomings, an alternative lens is proposed—one that shifts the emphasis away from novelty and unpredictability towards failability. Failability is understood as the inherent exposure of an endeavour to failure, specifically through scope creep. Scope creep arises when requirements change during implementation, expanding or altering what must be delivered beyond what was originally agreed.
Under this framing, an initiative qualifies as a project not because it is innovative or uncertain, but because it is vulnerable to failure through uncontrolled changes to scope. This is a critical distinction. While timeframes and budgets can often be adjusted for strategic or operational reasons, scope is far less malleable without undermining the integrity of the intended outcome. It is therefore scope—and the risk of its uncontrolled expansion—that sits at the centre of what makes a project a project.
Seen in this way, the true value proposition of project management lies not merely in delivering novel outcomes, but in protecting scope, managing change, and safeguarding the conditions under which value is meant to be realised. Projects, at their core, are structured responses to the risk of failure arising from doing something with defined intent, within defined limits, in an environment where change is always possible.