Project Initiation is all about the ground work. Not the Planning, that’s something different, that has its own stage. This is about lining up your ducks, getting things ready so that you can start the Planning activities.
Project Initiation is pretty much Document Control:
Keeping and tracking the project documents is more important than where or how you keep them. Clearly some systems are better suited to this and depending on the size of the project, some systems might be too much work or not offer enough checks and balances to ensure you’re staying on the right track.
Some of your document management choices include:
If you’re new to this game, you’ll quickly realise that Project Management is really about communication, planning and administration activities. Deciding who you’re going to tell and how often can sometimes be dictated by a higher function, in the PRINCE2 world this might be defined in the Directing a Project stage.
Ultimately the main point here is that you need to tell people that you have a project, perhaps you’ll identify the team at this stage and you’ll let people know if you think you’ll need their input at some point.
The Project Definition is the act of bringing everything you know about the project so far together, this may be in something like a Project Initiation form or a Scope Clarification document for example.
This is where we start building up the paperwork, so far we’ve allocated a space for the paperwork, we’ve started identifying some key players and now we’re going to document that and start building templates that we can use throughout the life of the project.
For some of your projects, you’re going to be working with Clients or Customers. That Customer could be anyone from A-N-Other Company (business-to-business), Mrs Jones (and her loft extension), Your Family (home improvements), your Departmental Manager (server upgrade project) as a number of examples.
This may involve one or more meetings to thrash out the early project scope or it may be an information gathering exercise so that you can identify who to contact and when.
We’re getting to the end of the stage now, this is when stuff starts getting real! For an IT Infrastructure project, this might be where we bring in a number of functional teams or the team leads and give them an overview of the project. In my case, my projects are rarely IT centric, these are much bigger Programs that involve an element of IT. As such, my IT groups may know that I need a server room but may not understand the location, the bigger Program or any very specific risks and or requirements. This is my opportunity to engage the people I will depend on in order to deliver this project successfully.
How you approach this is down to you, your organisation or your project. We tend to hold one or more presentations so that we can get people on board, run through the project and explain how their part fits in and then give them a very high-level schedule with the aim of at least letting them know when they should expect a follow-up meeting.