A project (or program[citation needed]) is any undertaking, carried out individually or collaboratively and possibly involving research or design, that is carefully planned (usually[quantify] by a project team[citation needed], but sometimes by a project manager or by a project planner) to achieve a particular aim.[1]
An alternative view sees a project managerially as a sequence of events: a "set of interrelated tasks to be executed over a fixed period and within certain cost and other limitations".[2]
A project may be a temporary (rather than permanent) social system (work system), possibly staffed by teams (within or across organizations) to accomplish particular tasks under time constraints.[3]
Note that open-source software "projects" or artists' musical "projects" (for example) may lack defined team-membership, precise planning and/or time-limited durations.
The word project comes from the Latin word projectum from the Latin verb proicere, "before an action" which in turn comes from pro-, which denotes precedence, something that comes before something else in time (paralleling the Greek πρό) and iacere, "to do". The word "project" thus originally meant "before an action".
When the English language initially adopted the word, it referred to a plan of something, not to the act of actually carrying this plan out. Something performed in accordance with a project became known as an "object". Every project has certain phases of development.