In your assigned reading in Week 1, you learned about projects and project management and how these add value to an organization. This week, you learned about the environment in which a project operates. Projects enable the organization to achieve strategic goals and objectives and project management allows organizations to implement projects in the most effective and efficient manner possible. Consider your current organization or an organization within your community with which you are familiar or have worked on a project. Identify a project that was implemented to support the organization's strategic goals and objectives. Briefly, describe the project. Why would you consider this to be a project (characteristics)? What internal and external factors influenced this project (good or bad)? How did this project support the organization's strategic direction?

An example of a community organization could be the community historic society and a project that you might have been involved with could have been a fundraiser. This fundraiser would support the organization's strategic goals and objectives. It would be a project because it had specific goals/objectives, was temporary with specific milestones, produced a product, process, or result, had a budget, stakeholders, resources, risks, etc. Another example could be a new EPIC system installed at a regional hospital. Of course, this system is in response to the EMR Mandate that requires healthcare providers to convert all medical charts to a digital format. Both examples are projects but were implemented for different reasons. As you think about projects, consider why they were implemented.