I can relate to the parent comment and there are differences between doing an IT project for money and PhD. I think, you rather meant poorly defined requiremen

I can relate to the parent comment and there are differences between doing an IT project for money and PhD. I think, you rather meant poorly defined requirements for an IT project. The goals of the project do not matter for you, you get the requirements from a paid project and the one responsible of the project has to think about the goals. While during PhD you have to define your own goals. Also, as on the picture in the post, you have to push from the circle, you have to find it where you want to push and you have to define how much should you push. While doing an IT project, you are usually moving inside the circle, i.e. you are usually combining working concepts.