Sun Zi said: Warfare is of vital importance to the Nation... Application to Project Management?

孫子曰：兵者，國之大事，死生之地，存亡之道，不可不察也

Sun Zi said:
Warfare is of vital importance to the Nation. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to survival or to destruction. It has to be examined carefully.

Parallel to Project Management
In many organizations today, projects are sometimes started casually by different people within the organizations for various reasons. In many cases, projects are started even when nobody is yet clear what end objectives the project should deliver. And because many people are unclear what the objectives of the project are, both to the organization and to themselves, they (including the senior management of the organization) do not treat the project with enough importance to give it the necessary support for it to succeed.

The enlightened management of an organization should realise that projects (or programs) should rightfully be regarded as an endeavour undertaken by the organization to help it achieve some strategic objectives. It should therefore be considered of vital importance to the organization. Whether the project succeeds or fails, it can either lead the organization forward (survival and even prosper) or backward (decline and even destruction in the long run). Thus projects have to be studied carefully before being launched.

If a project cannot be considered of vital importance to the organization, then it is probably not something that is worth doing, and perhaps should not even have been started.