What is platonic metaphysics?

Collect information about any five scientists and their inventions and paste pictures an write about?

ArchimedesArchimedes of Syracuse (c.287 BC - c. 212 BC) was an ancient Greek mathematician, physicist and engineer. Although little is known about his life, he is regarded as one of the most important scientists in classical antiquity. In addition to making important discoveries in the field of mathematics and geometry, he is credited with producing machines that were well ahead of their time.The Ancient Roman historians showed a strong interest in Archimedes and wrote several biographies relating to his life and works, while the few copies of his treatises that survived through the Middle Ages were a major influence on scientists during the Renaissance.Archimedes produced the first known summation of an infinite series with a method that is still used in the area of calculus today.Archimedes was a famous mathematician whose theorems and philosophies became world known. He gained a reputation in his own time which few other mathematicians of this period achieved. He is considered by most historians of mathematics as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.AristotleAristotle (384 BC - March 7, 322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote many books about physics, poetry, zoology, logic, rhetoric, government, and biology.Aristotle, along with Plato and Socrates, are generally considered the three most influential ancient Greek philosophers in Western thought. Among them they transformed Presocratic Greek philosophy into the foundations of Western philosophy as we know it. The writings of Plato and Aristotle form the core of Ancient philosophy.Aristotle placed much more value on knowledge gained from the senses and would correspondingly be better classed among modern empiricists (see materialism and empiricism). He also achieved a "grounding" of dialectic in the Topics by allowing interlocutors to begin from commonly held beliefs (Endoxa); his goal being non-contradiction rather than Truth. He set the stage for what would eventually develop into the scientific method centuries later. Although he wrote dialogues early in his career, no more than fragments of these have survived.The works of Aristotle that still exist today are in treatise form and were, for the most part, unpublished texts. These were probably lecture notes or texts used by his students, and were almost certainly revised repeatedly over the course of years. As a result, these works tend to be eclectic, dense and difficult to read.Among the most important ones are Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, De Anima (On the Soul) and Poetics.Their works, although connected in many fundamental ways, are very different in both style and substance.Aristotle is known for being one of the few figures in history who studied almost every subject possible at the time. In science, Aristotle studied anatomy, astronomy, embryology, geography, geology, meteorology, physics, and zoology.In philosophy, Aristotle wrote on aesthetics, economics, ethics, government, metaphysics, politics, psychology, rhetoric and theology. He also dealt with education, foreign customs, literature and poetry. His combined works practically comprise an encyclopedia of Greek knowledge.Nicolas CopernicusFebruary 19, 1473 - May 24, 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus was the first astronomer to formulate a scientifically-based heliocentric cosmology that displaced the Earth from the center of the universe. His epochal book, "De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium" - On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres - is often regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy and the defining epiphany that began the Scientific Revolution.Publication of De RevolutionibusAlthough Greek, Indian and Muslim savants had published heliocentric hypotheses centuries before Copernicus, his publication of a scientific theory of heliocentrism, demonstrating that the motions of celestial objects can be explained without putting the Earth at rest in the center of the universe, stimulated further scientific investigations and became a landmark in the history of modern science that is known as the Copernican Revolution.Among the great polymaths of the Renaissance, Copernicus was a mathematician, astronomer, physician, classical scholar, translator, Catholic cleric, jurist, governor, military leader, diplomat and economist. Among his many responsibilities, astronomy figured as little more than an avocation - yet it was in that field that he made his mark upon the world.Copernicus proposed that the planets have the Sun as the fixed point to which their motions are to be referred; that the Earth is a planet which, besides orbiting the Sun annually, also turns once daily on its own axis; and that very slow, long-term changes in the direction of this axis account for the precession of the equinoxes.This representation of the heavens is usually called the heliocentric, or "Sun-centred," system--derived from the Greek Helios, meaning "Sun." Copernicus's theory had important consequences for later thinkers of the scientific revolution, including such major figures as Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton.CommentariolusIn the Commentariolus (Little Commentary), Nicolaus Copernicus outlined his revolutionary Copernican heliocentrism theory of the solar system, about three decades before he finally published his major six volume work De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543. Copernicus did not publish the Commentariolus, and handed it only to few friends. It is unknown who received the Commentariolus, and when. He had written the preliminary manuscript description of his early version of the theory sometime before 1515. Some scholars believe it was as late as 1533 due to the maturity of the theory. It was never printed or otherwise published during Copernicus's lifetime, and its existence was only known indirectly until copies were published in the second half of the nineteenth century.The only other astronomical work written by Copernicus, besides the Commentariolus and De Revolutionibus, was a letter written in 1524 to one of his former fellow students at the Cracow Academy, Bernard Wapowski (The Letter against Werner). This letter, which, like the Commentariolus, circulated in manuscript but was not published during Copernicus's own lifetime, criticized De motu octauÃ¦ SphÃ¦rÃ¦ tractatus primus, a work published in 1522 by Johannes Werner, which outlined a method of trepidations to account for purported variations in the rate of precession of the equinoxes.The Commentariolus was known among scholars. In 1533, Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter delivered in Rome a series of lectures outlining Copernicus' theory. The lectures were heard with interest by Pope Clement VII and several Catholic cardinals. On 1 November 1536, Nikolaus Cardinal von SchÃ¶nberg, Archbishop of Capua, wrote a letter to Copernicus from Rome, urging him to publish. Georg Joachim Rheticus and Tiedemann Giese[citation needed] then compiled an introduction to Copernicus' theory, the Narratio Prima, to be published by Franz Rhode in 1540. This was instrumental for Copernicus' approval to publish De revolutionibus.Benjamin FranklinBenjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 Â April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author and printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and the glass 'armonica'. He formed both the first public lending library in America and first fire department in Pennsylvania. He was an early proponent of colonial unity, and as a political writer and activist he supported the idea of an American nation. As a diplomat during the American Revolution he secured the French alliance that helped to make independence of the United States possible.Franklin is credited as being foundational to the roots of American values and character, a marriage of the practical and democratic Puritan values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of Henry Steele Commager, "In Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat." To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin, "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become."Franklin became a newspaper editor, printer, and merchant in Philadelphia, becoming very wealthy, writing and publishing Poor Richard's Almanack and the Pennsylvania Gazette. Franklin was interested in science and technology, and gained international renown for his famous experiments. He played a major role in establishing the University of Pennsylvania and Franklin & Marshall College and was elected the first president of the American Philosophical Society.Franklin became a national hero in America when he spearheaded the effort to have Parliament repeal the unpopular Stamp Act. An accomplished diplomat, he was widely admired among the French as American minister to Paris and was a major figure in the development of positive Franco-American relations. From 1775 to 1776, Franklin was Postmaster General under the Continental Congress and from 1785 to 1788 was President of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania. Toward the end of his life, he became one of the most prominent abolitionists.His colorful life and legacy of scientific and political achievement, and status as one of America's most influential Founding Fathers, has seen Franklin honored on coinage and money; warships; the names of many towns, counties, educational institutions, namesakes, and companies; and more than two centuries after his death, countless cultural references.Isaac NewtonSir Isaac Newton (January 4, 1643 - March 31, 1727) was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, and natural philosopher who is generally regarded as one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians in history. Newton wrote the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in which he described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics. By deriving Kepler's laws of planetary motion from this system, he was the first to show that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws. The unifying and deterministic power of his laws was integral to the scientific revolution and the advancement of heliocentrism. Among other scientific discoveries, Newton realised that the spectrum of colours observed when white light passes through a prism is inherent in the white light and not added by the prism (as Roger Bacon had claimed in the thirteenth century), and notably argued that light is composed of particles.He also developed a law of cooling, describing the rate of cooling of objects when exposed to air.He enunciated the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum.Finally, he studied the speed of sound in air, and voiced a theory of the origin of stars.Despite this renown in mainstream science, Newton actually spent more time working on alchemy than physics, writing considerably more papers on the former than the latter.Newton played a major role in the development of calculus, sharing credit with Gottfried Leibniz. He also made contributions to other areas of mathematics, for example the generalised binomial theorem. The mathematician and mathematical physicist Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736Â1813), said that "Newton was the greatest genius that ever existed and the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish."Galileo GalileiFebruary 15, 1564 - January 8, 1642Galileo Galilei was a Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism.Galileo has been called the "father of modern observational astronomy", the "father of modern physics",the "father of science", and "the Father of Modern Science." The motion of uniformly accelerated objects, taught in nearly all high school and introductory college physics courses, was studied by Galileo as the subject of kinematics. His contributions to observational astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter, named the Galilean moons in his honour, and the observation and analysis of sunspots. Galileo also worked in applied science and technology, improving compass design.Galileo's championing of Copernicanism was controversial within his lifetime. The geocentric view had been dominant since the time of Aristotle, and the controversy engendered by Galileo's presentation of heliocentrism as proven fact resulted in the Catholic Church's prohibiting its advocacy as empirically proven fact, because it was not empirically proven at the time and was contrary to the literal meaning of Scripture. Galileo was eventually forced to recant his heliocentrism and spent the last years of his life under house arrest on orders of the Roman Inquisition.His formulation of (circular) inertia, the law of falling bodies, and parabolic trajectories marked the beginning of a fundamental change in the study of motion.His insistence that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics changed natural philosophy from a verbal, qualitative account to a mathematical one in which experimentation became a recognized method for discovering the facts of nature.Finally, his discoveries with the telescope revolutionized astronomy and paved the way for the acceptance of the Copernican heliocentric system, but his advocacy of that system eventually resulted in an Inquisition process against him.

What is science concept in a science project?

The Concept of 'Project': A Proposal for a Unifying Definition Andreas Munk-Madsen Dept. of Computer Science, Aalborg University amm@cs.aau.dk Abstract. "Project" is a key concept in IS management. The word is frequently used in textbooks and standards. Yet we seldom find a precise definition of the concept. This paper discusses how to define the concept of a project. The proposed definition covers both heavily formalized projects and informally organized, agile projects. Based on the proposed definition popular existing definitions are discussed. Keywords: Project, definition, project management, software development, agile. 1. Introduction 1.1. Motivation Many authors give us guidelines for how we should manage projects. Yet they often lack precision as to what they consider a project. When we read a guideline we want to know which phenomena it applies to. We want to know what the author considers to be a project and what is not considered a project. It would also be nice to know whether a guideline applies to a larger class of phenomena than just projects, or whether it only applies to a subclass of project, e.g. IS projects. - 2 - From a scientific point of view a precise definition is useful if we want to reproduce the reasoning, the experiments, or the observations that lead to the formulation of the guidelines. Let us illustrate the problem we want to address with an example. A widespread model for software engineering, CMMI-SW (Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute, 2002), makes heavily use of the word "project". The word is used to denote two of the fundamental process areas, "Project Planning" and "Project Monitoring and Control". CMMI-SW defines a project in this way: ... a "project" is a ... set of ... resources ... [that] typically operates according to a plan. The complete definition is more complex, which in itself is a problem. We will deal with the complete definition later. Here we only focus on a few aspects. The first problem is the choice of a general concept from which the concept project is specialized. A set of resources can be almost anything from money on a bank account to food in a refrigerator. A project has little in common with these sets of resources. So the general concept is not well chosen. It is too general. The second problem is the word typically. It signifies that the ensuing feature is true for most, but not all, projects. Therefore this is not a distinguishing feature. We cannot use the feature to determine whether a given phenomenon is a project or not. And given a project, we cannot be sure that it possesses the feature. The third problem is that the concept of a plan is linked to the definition of a project. It exempts CMMI-SW from arguing why a project must a have plan, as this by definition is true in most cases. This paper will discuss how we can remedy such problems by putting more care into our definition of project. 1.2. Research Methodology A definition is a part of a theory; actually a fundamental part. Creating and analyzing definitions is a theoretical activity. Thus, it is not possible in an empirical way to "prove" the "correctness" of a definition. Correctness is not an attribute that applies to a definition. The qualities of a definition are pragmatic: · a certain conformity to the intuitive informal use of the concept, · the simplicity and the internal consistency of the definition, · and the elegance of how the definition helps us structure and present existing knowledge. The reasons for using a particular definition roughly sum up to "presentation power". The methodology for creating definitions is not a deductive process where the definition is reached as a final conclusion. It is essentially an interaction between restating proposals for definitions and testing them against relevant parts of the existing body of knowledge. The discussion of other definitions uses a limited form - 3 - of textual analysis. Since these definition all claim generality, it is considered a reasonable approach to focus on the actual text of the definitions. The simplest way to present a proposed definition is to regard it as a hypothesis: "This definition has high presentation power". The hypothesis can then be supported when the definition is used to present central parts of the relevant knowledge. The proof of the hypothesis basically resides with the reader. That is the way in which the present paper is structured. Section 2 discusses definitions in general. Why should we define our concepts and how can we do this? Section 3 presents two different definitions of project drawn from the field of organization theory. One definition focuses on the kind of tasks that is solved in a project, the other definition focuses on the way the work in the project is organized. Based on the theory of Mintzberg (1983) it is argued that these two definitions are equivalent. Section 4 shows how these definitions can be used in presenting our understanding of software projects. It discusses the features that unite and the features that divide two popular schools of thought in IS management, the agile and the heavy methodologies. Section 5 shows how the insight represented in our definitions can be used when we discuss other definitions of project found in literature. 2. Definitions A definition is a statement explaining the meaning of a word (Collins Cobuild, 1987). It supports identification and understanding of a phenomenon. This section explains the purpose of definitions in science and discusses how we can construct definitions. 2.1. Why Define? Must we create definitions? No, in many situations we may do well without precise definitions. Dahlbom and Mathiassen (1993) explain: A lot of our knowledge is tacit, unformulated. Our actions are to a great extent based on knowhow, rather than on explicitly formulated rules and principles. They make a distinction between Platonic and Aristotelian concepts: A lot of our knowledge is based on Platonic conceptions, on exemplary instances or paradigmatic cases, rather than on Aristotelian concepts, explicit rules and definitions. And they explain where we need definitions: But if we want to develop our knowledge, to question and change our values, we must confront them by trying to make them explicit. Alter (2000) argues for more precise definitions in the field of IS: - 4 - …the lack of conscious attention to the meanings of basic terms and points of reference may be a significant impediment to effective communication and to our ability to make sense out of research findings and even journalistic anecdotes about what seemed to work or not work in particular situations. Explicit definitions are important in science. Definitions improve communication and understanding. Precise definitions help us to ensure that we talk about the same phenomena. Precise definitions makes it easier to check that empirical evidence support theoretical theses. Precise definitions also help avoiding circular reasoning where what appears as a thesis is only a redundant restatement of basic assumptions. Definitions are important prerequisites for the conceptual grounding that is a part of the multi-grounding of design theories proposed by Goldkuhl (2004). There is a limit to the clarity we can achieve through definitions. We are using natural language to describe phenomena only partially understood. Some of these phenomena belong to the real world and can only be partially formalized. Still, this does not contradict the underlying assumption that some definitions are better than others for supporting identification and understanding. 2.2. The Format of Definitions We normally define a concept by relating it to other concepts that we assume the reader is familiar with. This can be done is different ways. We can decompose the concept and explain it as an aggregate of other concepts. E.g. "A chair consists of a horizontal plate, called the seat, to which is attached one or more legs…" Usually this kind of definition is hard to understand. It may help us identify or even build a chair, but it does not tell us why we need a chair, and it does not place the chair in any context. If there is a small number of objects in the class denoted by the concept we may just specify them. E.g. "Scandinavia consists of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden". This is a precise specification, but it does not say anything about the characteristics of the concept. We may give examples of objects or subclasses in the class denoted by the concept, but that would only be a Platonic definition. It would illustrate the concept but not give any explicit explanation. We can associate the concept to other concepts and explain the relations to these concepts. E.g. "Chairs are often used together with tables…" This will provide some understanding of the context of the defined phenomenon. However, this kind of definition may lose sharpness because of the introduction of unnecessary concepts. The best format for a definition is the classic Aristotelian: Definitio fit per genus proximum et differentiam specificam. (Aristotle, 350 B.C.; Smith, 2004). Here we explain the concept by specifying a relevant superclass and some characteristic that distinguish the concept from neighboring classes. E.g. "A chair is a piece of - 5 - furniture for one person to sit on." The relevant superclass, genus proximum, classifies the concept and the concept inherits the properties of the superclass. Thus in our example the entire "theory" of furniture - including context and theses - now applies to chairs. The distinguishing characteristic, differentia, should ideally tell us the features that only the objects in the concept possess. The choice of the dimension of the differentia is important. In the example with the chair the distinguishing dimension is the use of the furniture. We could have chosen another dimension, e.g. construction. This would give us a definition as: "A chair is a piece of furniture with a horizontal plate approximately 45 cm above the floor." The choice of distinguishing dimension in our definition depends on the kind of theory we want to present. Is it a theory of how to use chairs or how to build chairs? Of course we might want a combined theory of how to build useful chairs. In that case we need both definitions, and we must discuss whether they are equivalent. The differentia should be both necessary and sufficient to distinguish the considered concept. Sufficient means that we will not permit irrelevant phenomena into the considered class. Insufficiency is fairly simple to demonstrate as it can be illustrated by an example. The inclusion of more than the necessary features in the differentia often involves redundancy. This leads to more subtle complications as it may confuse both argument and presentation. Elimination of redundancy from the differentia is basically an application of the principle of Occam's Razor. Genus proximum et differentiam specificam is only a guideline for the format of a definition. Using the best format for a definition gives no guarantee that genus and differentia are well chosen. We still need to evaluate proposed definitions in relation to our other notions of the concept. 3. Projects Project is a central phenomenon in the field of IS, as systems normally are developed and implemented in projects. Practically everybody who talks about system development methodology will also use the word project. However, as we shall see later, many authors do not give a precise definition of the concept. In this section we explore two fundamentally different definitions of project and argue for the equivalence of these two definitions. 3.1. Two Definitions The word project is derived from Latin where "pro" means "forward" and "jacere" means "throw". Thus the original meaning of project is something that in a figurative sense has been thrown forward, a proposal. The meaning has gradually - 6 - been extended to include the process of realizing the proposal and the people who perform the realization. As a relevant genus for our definition of project we need a word that denotes people working together. For this we could use "organization". However, some people understand organization purely as a legal entity. We want our definition to include parts of legal entities as well as people from different legal entities working together. For this reason the genus of project is chosen to be organizational unit. But colloquially we will use organization as a synonym. We then need to specify the differentia, what separates a project from other kinds of organizations. One relevant dimension for the distinguishing characteristic is the kind of tasks solved by the organization. Inspired by Mintzberg (1983) we can suggest the following definition: Definition 1: A project is an organizational unit that solves a unique and complex task. By stating that the task is unique we exclude most organizations where task repetition is a prominent feature. This is not the case in IS development. In IS development the task is always unique, at least to the actual developers. If not so, they could solve the task once and just press "copy" for the rest. The feature of uniqueness entails that the task must be delimited both in scope and time. This delimitation may not be entirely clear in the beginning of the project, and it may change during the course of the project. However, if we experienced a permanent stream of changing tasks we would say that this was no longer a single project. The task must have some complexity before it belongs in a project. If the task is simple most people will know how to solve it, and the amount of organizational overhead normally associated with a project will not be needed. We should note that both uniqueness and complexity are relative to the project participants. That somebody on the other side of the earth has great experience in solving the actual task and considers it simple is irrelevant if our participants are not aware of this. Definition 1 looks at a project from the outside. It focuses on an important situational factor, namely what we use a project for. This raises the questions: What are the internal characteristics of a project? And which principles apply to managing a project? We shall address these questions shortly. But first we will consider another definition. An important design parameter for an organization is the way in which the people coordinate their work, the prime coordinating mechanism. Mintzberg (1983) lists five different coordinating mechanisms: · direct supervision, · standardization of work processes, · standardization of work outputs, · standardization of worker skills, · and mutual adjustment. - 7 - All of these coordinating mechanisms are used in all organizations, but in any organization some mechanism is the most important, and this can be used as a defining characteristic. Inspired by Mintzberg's concept of the adhocracy, we can define project the following way: Definition 2: A project is an organizational unit where the prime coordinating mechanism is mutual adjustment. In this definition the differentia is an internal feature. This immediately raises the questions: What is the use of such an organization? What kind tasks is this type of organizations suited to solve? The answers to these and the previously raised questions follow when we argue for the equivalence of definitions 1 and 2. 3.2. The Equivalence of the Definitions We shall argue for the equivalence of definition 1 and 2 in the sense that they in practice describe the same phenomena. Thesis 1: An organizational unit that solves a unique and complex task must use mutual adjustment as the prime coordinating mechanism. The reasoning behind this thesis is that the other coordinating mechanisms cannot do the job. Standardization will be too expensive when we are dealing with a unique task. Direct supervision scales badly so any medium sized or larger task will overload the supervisor. Thesis 2: An organizational unit where the prime coordinating mechanism is mutual adjustment should only be used to solve tasks that are unique and complex. The reasoning behind thesis 2 is that, albeit projects can solve other types of tasks, mutual adjustment compared to other mechanisms is dramatically inefficient for coordinating repetitive work or non-complex tasks. The reasoning for thesis 1 and 2 depends on the assertion that Mintzberg's list of coordination mechanisms is exhaustive. This is an empirical fact that according to Mintzberg so far holds pretty much true. Thesis 1 and 2 can be combined to thesis 3. This may be seen as an application of Mintzberg's Extended Configuration Thesis on the domain of project organization. Thesis 3: Definition 1 is equivalent to definition 2. Thus it becomes a matter of perspective which definition of project we choose. From a theoretical viewpoint the internal characteristics will perhaps best represent the essence of a project. From an application perspective the natural choice would be to start with the problem, definition 1, and then use thesis 3 to state that definition 2 is the solution. - 8 - 4. Agile and Heavy Projects A problem that has arisen in the last few years is how to explain the agile projects (Beck et al., 2001). They are definitely phenomena that we should call projects as they fulfil both definition 1 and 2 above. However, they fit badly into the CMMISW definition, as one of the core values of the agile manifesto explicitly downgrade the concept of plan (Beck et al., 2001): We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:…Responding to change over following a plan It is a relevant exercise to explain, in a simple way, what agile and heavy projects have in common and where they differ. Definitions 1 and 2 is one way of explaining the communality between the two different types of projects. To explain the difference we must look deeper into the distinguishing property mutual adjustment. There is a wide spectrum of ways in which mutual adjustment can take place. This spectrum is reflected in the great variation among different projects. In this section we first describe the different ways in which a project can be coordinated, and we relate some of these differences to the dimension spanned by the frequency with which the mutual adjustment is performed. Secondly we discuss which tasks agile and heavy methods are suited to solve. Finally we mention two other important dimensions that could be used to characterize the difference between agile and heavy projects. 4.1. Discrete or Continuous Adjustment Mutual adjustment is not a very precise concept. Mintzberg also talks about liaison devices, and identifies the meeting as the prime vehicle used to facilitate mutual adjustment. Meetings span a whole range from ad hoc gatherings to the work of task forces and standing committees. Other liaison devices are integrating managers and liaison positions. Using the ordinary vocabulary of project management we can list a number of liaison devices: · People filling certain roles: Project manager, steering committee chairman, sponsor, customer representative, etc. · Groups of people meeting to perform coordination: Project group, steering committee, user group, etc. · Artifacts documenting agreements in a project: Requirement specification, project plan, product architecture, minutes from steering committee meeting, etc. The extent to which the various liaison devices are used define a broad range of different ways to manage a project. Clearly the presence of some of these devices can make up for the absence of others. Thus it is problematic to focus on one of the devices, the project plan, and to include it in a definition of the concept of project. - 9 - "To plan or not to plan" seems to be a major distinction between heavy and agile projects. Boehm and Turner (2004) call the traditional methods or approaches, that are not agile, for "plan-driven". Abstracting a little further, we can see this distinction as a preference in liaison devices. We can also describe the distinction as a difference in the frequency of the mutual adjustment. This leads to suggesting the following definitions: Definition 3: An agile project is an organizational unit where the prime coordinating mechanism is continuous mutual adjustment. Definition 4: An heavy project is an organizational unit where the prime coordinating mechanism is discrete mutual adjustment. 4.2. Complexity and Ideology When we tighten the differentia from definition 2 to definitions 3 and 4 we reduce the number of phenomena that fit the definitions. This leads to the question of what the corresponding restriction on definition 1 should be. This is the question of what kind of tasks agile and heavy projects respectively can be used to solve. Obviously the differentia to examine is complexity. Beck (2000) gives us a clue in the chapter where he discusses when you shouldn't try XP: Size clearly matters. You probably couldn't run an XP project with a hundred programmers. Nor fifty. Nor twenty, probably. Ten is definitely doable. Highsmith (2004) is not happy with this restriction: One myth about agile approaches goes something like this: "APM (or pick any agile methodology) works well for smaller projects, but it doesn't scale to larger ones." [APM is Highsmith's abbreviation for Agile Project Management.] Therefore Highsmith proposes a number of techniques to facilitate scaling. One of these is a "Commitment-Accountability Protocol Card". It describes · an outcome, · acceptance criteria, · supplier team, · consumer team(s), · intermediate deliverables, · and estimated work effort. This is clearly a written documentation of an agreement. Once it is produced we would only expect it to be changed at discrete intervals. If we added a deadline this would be a reinvention of a project plan, albeit a decentralized one. So Highsmith has not contradicted Beck. He is proposing to scale the agile methods by including a key element from the heavy methods. The number of developers is not a sufficient differentia when we wish to determine the kind of tasks where agile and heavy projects are useful. Boehm and - 10 - Turner (2004) proposes 5 dimensions to describe the situational factors distinguishing agile from heavy projects: As a "summary of summaries," we have concluded that there are five critical factors involved in determining the relative suitability of agile or plan-driven methods in a particular project situation. These factors ... are the project's size, criticality, dynamism, personnel, and culture factors. Some of these factors may be abstracted into the differentia of complexity. But the readiness of the IS people and the surroundings to accept agile or heavy methods clearly matters. This is what Boehm and Turner call culture. We might also talk about ideology. So we may conclude that there is not a simple extension of definition 1 that can define agile and heavy projects based on the difference of tasks. 4.3. Technology Cost and Strategy Two other dimension that in general should be involved in characterizing IS projects are strategy and technology, in particular the costs of using various technologies. Indeed these are the defining distinctions for Highsmith (2004): When we reduce the cost of experimentation enough, the entire economics of how we do product development changes - it switches from a process based on anticipation (define, design, and build) to one based on adaption (envision, explore, and adapt). The available technology, in this case the technology for experimentation, and we could add the technology for rework, is a major characteristic of the task. The strategy, in this case anticipation or adaption, is a major internal feature of a project. 5. Definitions in Literature In this section we will discuss various definitions of project found in literature. We take a look at some dictionary definitions, a textbook definition, three definitions from management and IS standards, and a definition from general project management theory. The overall impression is that - although it is hard to find two identical definitions - all definitions revolve around a common center, and that this not too far from the definitions in this paper. 5.1. Dictionary Definitions Collins Cobuild (1987) defines project this way: A project is 1.1. an idea or plan that you intend to carry out in the future or that is being carried out at present. 1.2. a detailed study of a particular subject. Webster (1989) defines project this way: project. 1. something that is contemplated, devised, or planned; plan; scheme. 2. a large or major undertaking, esp. one involving considerable money, personnel, and equipment. 3. a - 11 - specific task of investigation, esp. in scolarship. 4. Educ. an educational assignment necessitating personal initiative on the part of a student. In most of the definitions there is an absence of a proper genus proximum. Some of the definitions indicate complexity as a distinguishing characteristic. It is hard to find uniqueness as a property. These definitions are probably typical for the popular perception of the concept of a project. In their vagueness they are not incorrect, but they are not a sound basis for building a theory about projects. It is difficult to understand that many authors of textbooks on projects do not take the effort to discuss their own definition. 5.2. A Textbook Definition Many textbooks and standards make heavily use of the word project without defining the concept explicitly. Among them are Highsmith (2004), McConnell (1998), Briner et al. (1996), and Page-Jones (1985). Two authors that do define project are Weiss and Wysocki (1992): A project is defined as having the following characteristics: - Complex and numerous activities - Unique - a one-time set of events - Finite - with a begin and end date - Limited resources and budget - Many people involved, usually across several functional areas in the organizations - Sequenced activities - Goal-oriented - End product or service must result If there is any priority in this sequence we will notice that the first two characteristics are the same as in our definition 1. This definition illustrates that authors of textbooks cannot depend on the popular definitions. This definition is much more narrow and precise than the dictionary definitions. There is an abundance of characteristics in this definition. Some of them could be derived from the others. That would reduce the redundancy in the definition. The genus is not stated explicitly, but the following reveals that it is task: ... it is evident that a task becomes a project when the above factors begin to dominate ... This is a typical way of using the words task and project. It makes it difficult to distinguish between the task and the organization set up to solve it. And we need to do that when we talk project management. 5.3. A Standard Definition: PMBOK "A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge" (Project Management Institute, 2000) has the following definition: …a project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service. - 12 - Here the genus is endeavor. This facilitates the distinction between the task and the process of solving the task. However, the identity of the people who perform this process is weakened by this definition. Uniqueness is a distinguishing characteristic along with the time limitation. However, the uniqueness is associated to the result and not the task. This is too narrow a definition. Reproducing an existing product under quite different circumstances could be a very challenging task that would justify a project. Complexity is absent from the definition. This makes it too broad. 5.4. A Standard Definition: CMMI-SW "Project" is a central concept in the Capability Maturity Model Integration for Software Engineering (CMMI-SW) (Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute, 2002). Three key process areas carry the word "project" in their names: "Project planning", "Project monitoring and control", and "Integrated project management". In CMMI-SW we find the following definition: "In CMMI models, a "project" is a managed set of interrelated resources that delivers one or more products to a customer or end user. This set of resources has a definite beginning and end and typically operates according to a plan. Such a plan is frequently documented and specifies the product to be delivered or implemented, the resources and funds used, the work to be done, and a schedule for doing the work. A project can be composed of projects." "A ...set of...resources" could be interpreted as a genus, but not as a genus proximum. It is not a close superclass. "Organization" is defined in CMMI-SW. However this concept is defined as an aggregate of projects, so it cannot be used as a superclass of "project": "An organization is typically an administrative structure in which people collectively manage one or more projects as a whole,..." The CMMI-SW definition of "project" is in reality a definition by decomposition. The concept of a "project" is defined as an aggregation constructed from mainly "resources", "products", and one "customer". Still the definition could be correct, albeit hard to understand. But the distinguishing quality of "complexity" is missing, which makes the definition too broad. A newsboy who temporarily delivers a paper to a summer address is also a project according to this definition. On other aspects CMMI-SW's definition is too narrow. There is only one customer or end user. The situation where two or more users disagree is thus excluded. And the software developers are abstracted into "resources". As a consequence we should not expect to see politics or motivation as key process areas in the CMMI-SW. Half the text in CMMI-SW's definition of a "project" is used to define the concept of a "(project) plan". Again definition by decomposition is used. A plan is an aggregation of specifications of "products", "resources", "work", and a "schedule". Without genus the essence of the "plan" is lost. Is it a unilateral - 13 - directive or a multilateral agreement? Humphrey (1997) made a very strong case that a project plan must be a negotiated agreement in order to sustain commitment. That thesis is not supported very well by the CMMI-SW definition of plan. There is a reservation in the word "typically", but we are not told what happens in the non-typical situations. Apart from that, the definition implies that a project must have a plan. This is not just a narrowing of the definition. It is an inclusion of a nontrivial thesis. The necessity of the key process area "Project Planning" does not need to be proved anymore. That is a pity. The proof could provide us with conditions for when a project must be planned, and arguments for why a project must be planned. 5.5. A Standard Definition: Sysperanto Sysperanto (Alter, 2005) is an attempt to define core concepts of the IS field. It is denoted an ontology. It defines project this way: A project is a work system designed to go out of existence after producing a particular product. Work system is the central concept is this ontology. It is defined this way: Work system. A view of work as occurring through a purposeful system. Work is defined this way: Work. Effort applied to accomplish something within an organization or across organizations. Work systems are aggregates of nine elements: · work practices, · participants, · information, · technologies, · customers, · products & services, · environment, · infrastructure, · and strategies. In this definition we have approximately the same genus as in our definitions. Alter reserves the word organization for an aggregation of work systems. The defining characteristics for a project, a particular product and time limitation, are close to our differentia, uniqueness. But complexity is missing from the definition. Without this characteristic work systems solving trivially simple tasks are including in the class of project. It is interesting to note that technology and strategy are among the nine types of components in a work system and hence in a project. - 14 - 5.6. The 'Temporary Organization' School In the field of management theory a contemporary school views projects as primarily temporary organizations (Lundin and Söderholm, 1995). We immediately notice the agreement on the genus. As differentia, temporary is clearly necessary, but in itself insufficient. In definitions from this school we sometimes miss Mintzberg's clear distinction between situational factors and design parameters. One definition is given by Turner and Müller (2003): A project is a temporary organization to which resources are assigned to undertake a unique, novel and transient endeavour managing the inherent uncertainty and need for integration in order to deliver beneficial objectives of change. If we accept novel and complex as overlapping concepts, then the first half of this definition alligns pretty much with our definition 1. The second half of the definition points to uncertainty, integration and change as elements of a project. In their paper Turner and Müller argues that these elements are necessary consequences of the features mentioned in the first half of the definition. That is why the latter elements should be excluded from the definition and placed in a subsequent thesis. 6. Summary It has been proposed to define a project as an organizational unit that solves a unique and complex task. It has been demonstrated that this definition can embrace the traditional, heavy project management methodologies and the extreme, agile methodologies. It has been illustrated that the equivalent definition of a project as an organizational unit where the prime coordinating mechanism is mutual adjustment in a simple way can be extended to explain the difference between heavy and agile project management methodologies. The idea is to use the frequency of the mutual adjustment as a distinguishing characteristic between agile and heavy projects. It has been illustrated that some existing standards and textbooks have a concept of project that revolve around a common center, and that this not too far from the definitions in this paper. The proposed definition has been used to identify shortcomings of some of the existing definitions. An obvious extension of this paper - if space had allowed it - would be an examination of the distinguishing characteristics between different IS projects. This would require more dimensions than those discussed in this paper. Foremost we would need a concept of the technology involved to characterize the project's task, and we would need a concept of the project strategy to characterize the management method.

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