Having determined it makes sense to explore an idea further you must confirm that project management is the right approach, everyone is clear on goals and that the right team is in place and fully trained.
Confirmation of the right management approach to use (project management or other), project goal testing and clarification, feasibility design (if applicable), greatly reduced risk through team training.
Clarity from the outset prevents rework, increases confidence, identifies where feasibility may be advantageous, reduces risk through team formation and training, and independently verifies project goals.
Having determined it makes sense to explore an idea further and choosing project management as the correct approach to achieve your goal, the initiation stage is critical and never optional. Correctly managed this stage will increase feasibility confidence, prevent rework, and reduce risk.
When properly managed, project initiation presents the opportunity to quickly discover large amounts of risk. We go beyond your triple constraints of scope, schedule and resources, to help you determine the biggest risk of all, project feasibility. Early decisions to modify the scope or even abandon the project altogether will save your organisation the largest amount of resources possible. These same decisions taken later in the project will become extremely expensive, if not impossible to implement. Poorly initiated projects always lead to rework, unnecessary stress and will be identified as a cause when project failure is analysed. Our initiation service will immediately reduce or eliminate these and other risks.
We work with all internal and external stakeholders,
to identifying, developing, informing and managing
to establish and verify the project's goals (destination) and establish the best course of action to achieve them (direction). We know that project success depends on how well stakeholder expectations are managed. We manage the meetings, workshops and processes, using the tools and
techniques on how to their interests in a business driven change environment.
better stakeholder awareness
proven
process, supported by pragmatic, easy-to-use tools, through dialogue, exercises (individuals and groups)
and case studies.
The integrated workshop will help you to drive business or organizational change whilst
making sure that stakeholders remain engaged and supportive of the initiative.
• Advanced knowledge on areas vital to today’s change centric environment
• The integration that change and stakeholder management has on other elements of best practice
program and project management
• How to become immersed and involved in a structured approach to planning, implementing and
sustaining change
• The process of identifying, engaging, planning, informing and managing internal and external
stakeholders
• How to contribute toward the improvement of the project management methodology that your
organization adopts
• How to adopt a “welcome change” attitude, and how to focus on win/win outcomes
• Decision-making that is balanced between project and business needs
Common agreement between customer, project manager and project stakeholders.
We will seek and bring to light any serious problems or questions that require immediate attention prior to planning.
Prevention of costly mistakes that can accompany the initial excitement of a new project.
Detect and clear up any false expectations.
Initiation Stage & Risk
Formal authorisation of the project by Senior Management
While a business case can stack up, it initiself will not convince
Authority delegated to a project manager by Senior Management
Experienced people can deliver and should navigate through and negotiate with their organisation using the network of connections they have developed over time. This is fine when the size of the effort of the activity can be accomplished on a quid pro quo, "this for that" basis. However, the size, complexity and higher risk characteristics of projects means the organisation cannot rely on grace and favor and so, senior management need to delegate authority to the project manager for the duration of the project to deliver the agreed objectives.
Project Managers need to be aware that this is a delicate responsibility that in itself they need to manage. Its a balancing act between not running roughshod, against "this is the way the organisation has authorised to proceed". Senior management have not the time to manage the project (no matter how much they want to) so the charter mechanism is in place to clear the way.
and the principles before personalities, agreements instead of favours.
People will attempt to secure and manage resources that they are not authorised to e.g.
○ To ensure good understanding of the project terms and conditions;
The unofficial team will not have a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities (not that anyone has authorised them anyways)
○ To confirm the expectations or requirements of stakeholders;
Stakeholders will not have expressed their high level requirements (from which you can work to determine the project requirements)
Stakeholders will not have expressed their expectations (meaning that there is no way to manage these)
○ To initiate the administrative aspects of project.
Administrative aspects of the organisation will have been circumvented.
Benefits of initiating a project
The key benefits to initiating a project:
Common agreement between customer, project manager and project stakeholders.
Opportunity to find and bring to light any serious problems or questions that require immediate attention prior to initiation.
Prevention of costly mistakes that can accompany the initial excitement of a new project.
Clearing up of any false expectations.
Confidence that the project manager will be capable of delivering the project.
We bring our prepared process database and experience.
Your team will get up and running on how to proceed.
Entering the initiation stage of the project you still don't know the effort required to bring the idea into existence. Not having a clear picture of the project needed to achieve this means that you cannot be sure you can choose the right project manager. Yet someone needs to bring initial focus to the project, so sometimes an interim project manager is assigned. It is one of the stage outputs and so we can help bring the stage to completion.
We will work with you to further elaborate on the size of the the project in terms of time, cost and scope, using your business case as the foundation. We will gather and document high level requirements, needs, and expectations from all key people and produce a clearer picture of the project enough to identify the right project manager, and secure a project team that can develop the project plan that will ultimately show the most accurate size of the project effort.
or even execute elements without a plan (this even goes against the operations management but goes against project management.
ALL stakeholders need to be identified early
All stakeholders need to have an opportunity to give high level requirements, agree high level objectives
Business cases have a high level and need further elaboration in order to secure resources, and manager needs formal authorisation,usually this is on a low level
its this formality that authorises the project manager.
Initiation Stage outputs:
The key outputs of the stage are:
and are ready for planning stage.
, and they will communicated that
is supported by them and is to proceed.
the organisation will know that the project exists, what it will achieve.
This is where the wider organisation high level requirements and expectations are gathered, giving a more accurate picture of the project size and cost and timelines
It elaborates the idea to a point where a team can be formed and
Given proper management it ensures that planning is successful and therefore the project is too.
Increased probability of project success through
immediately reduced risk.
Common agreement between customer, project manager and project stakeholders.
We will seek and bring to light any serious problems or questions that require immediate attention prior to planning.
Prevention of costly mistakes that can accompany the initial excitement of a new project.
Detect and clear up any false expectations.
Organisations that need support making a decision on an idea that has one or more of the following dimensions:
...
Relative Effort and Time:
Relative Effort and Time:
You will have:
- explored and chosen the best option to deliver your idea
- captured the benefits that will define success
- identified initial estimated costs and resources
- decided that project management is the correct management approach to use
If you need pre initiation support click here >
We will work with you to:
create your project charter. This gives explicit authority from senior management for the project to proceed into planning.
We will further elaborate on the business case to achieve an order of magnitude
- Clearly identify the stages and phases of the project and the objectives of each one.
- Identify all the stakeholders, not just the obvious ones
- gather high level requirements
- gather high level expectations
- Initial communications plan stakeholder plan put forward a plan on how stakeholders will be managed and communicated high level scope agreement Agree project success criteria
- summary milestones Identify the order of magnitude budget for the project, stage or phase
- Confirm that the project is aligned with the organisations strategy
- Communicate the roles and responsibilities within the project
- If you haven't an internal project manager assigned we will assist you selecting the right one.
You can be confident that:
Senior decision makers will be confident that they can justify the commitment to:
- authorise the formation of the project team with enough resources for the planning stage
- delegate authority by assigning responsibility to a project manager.
formally authorise the project to proceed by a project charter that sets out
To delegate authority by assigning responsibility to a project manager;
The project team is formed and will understand
- their project roles and responsibilities for the planning stage
The project team will be ready for perhaps the most important stage of any project, the planning stage. It is this highly driven stage where front loading of effort occurs reducing the chances of failure and the costs of change once
All stakeholders are identified and a plan is in place to work with them
From experience we understand that initiation can be an unusual stage to manage. Here are just 3 common reasons:
This illusion stems from having received what amounts to approval for the idea, but only implied approval for the project. It will ruin a project even before it has begun. A rare absolute no brainer of a project, will have many questions that need to be answered before complete commitment can be given by management. A mandatory project (e.g. a regulatory driven), may during initiation prove that a different approach is needed.The approval following a business case is a signal to "proceed with caution", and not "go complete the project".
Combining project management inexperience with initial excitement, this "jump in and do it" approach before knowing what the project actually contains, is a mistake that will guarantee failure. Saying "we applied this approach before and it worked" means that it wasn't a project you were working on to begin with. By definition projects do not lend themselves to just doing it. That is not to say that this philosophy cannot produce great results but not where the size, interconnectedness, risks, time are great i.e. not when it's a project.
It does not follow that the person who expressed the idea or who developed the business case is the best person to be the project manager. Some people are great at generating ideas, but become bored with the tedium of implementing them. Being a great manager does not equate to being a great project manager (and vise versa). Organisations can recognise this by initially assigning an "interim" project manager, while they seek to fill the full time position. And of course if the interim manager wants to stay on, that remains an option.
If you want project initiation (along with all other project management capabilities) organisation wide and always to hand, our core solution, "Pro" project management framework solution, tailored to your company, can be put in place at a fraction of the cost of a few individual initiation engagements.
Learn more about a permanent solution
Project
Management
Framework
Business
Case
Framework
Idea
Management
Framework
and choosing project management as the correct approach to achieve your goal, you need to ensure
For years, the company has used JIRA to track issues and manage projects; Confluence to share information and collaborate; Bamboo to run builds, tests, and deployments; and HipChat for real-time messaging. When Splunk decided to migrate from Perforce to Git, the company evaluated several Git repository management solutions, including GitHub Enterprise. Given its success with Atlassian, the company also evaluated and ultimately chose Bitbucket Data Center.
