A project infrastructure is something that must be in place to give you any hope of project success. Eisenhower said, "No battle was ever won according to plan, but no battle was ever won without a plan." Similarly, having a solid foundation for project work won't guarantee success, but not having a foundation can pretty much guarantee failure for all but the most trivial projects. Most of these issues are not complicated (certainly not in the same sense that performance optimization techniques or clever coding algorithms are complicated), but they do require a fair amount of up-front investment to properly implement. They also become more valuable the larger your projects and project teams become. We'll categorize our project infrastructure discussion like this: