Start Project (SU)

Process flow

1. Project Mandate; The SP process is triggered by the issuing of a project mandate, such as: a request for proposal from a customer,  an internal corporate directive, initiating the next highest priority project on the corporate/programme demand backlog.

2. Appoint the Executive; as the internal project sponsor within the organisation with overall accountability for the business case, the project success and the project products delivered.

3. Appoint the Project Manager; the earlier the better is the process as the "conductor of the orchestra", i.e the project team.

4. Prepare the Business Case; to ensure there is continued business/orgnisational justification throughout its lifespan of the project, the Business Case will be reviewed at each stage boundary.

5. Appoint the Project Management Team; consisting of the Executive, the project manager as a minimum. Other PM Team members can include Senior User(s) of the proposed project products, as well as Senior Supllier(s) where external vendors will be providing or contributing to the project product delivery and/or support.

6. Create the Project Product Description; working from the requirements of the Project Products, document the scope and use cases for the the systems and produce the high-level descriptions of each product.

7. Capture the previous lessons; where no formal documentation exists, explore the results or interview the team members of recent projects to gain an understanding of what should be avoided/replecated in terms of previous experiences, tooling, people, processes, etc.

8. Define the project approach; using Glidepath as a basis for the project approach for ICT projects, that may be further tailored according to corporate standards and policies. Is this a build or buy project, internal versus externally resourced, pilot, implementation or upgrade of an extisting system, will the system be cloud hosted or self managed?  What are the implications of our choices for the project product description and how are the lessons learned from past project being applied?

9. Produce the Project Brief; the initial document that captures simply and concisely the context, rationale and objectives of the proposed project.  

10. Review the Project Brief; consilidating and agreeing all the the thinking on the proposed project baselines: benefits, scope, time, costs, quality and risks.

11. Plan Initiation Stage; on the basis of approvals by the project managment team, supported by Corporate/Customer stakeholders, define the Initiation Stage baselines and schedule as this is the stage where the project begins to incur significant costs amd impact on stakeholders. 

Key deliverables 

Project Brief (mandatory)

Until this stage discussion about the project may have been held over meetings, phone calls or workshops.  The development of this document serves to pull together the high-level overview of the project, to be shared with potential stakeholders for discuss, debate and further develop the project parameters and characteristics.   This exercise serves to ensure that effort and costs are mimimised by not launching into a full-scale project kickoff prematurely. By using a standard project brief template, competing projects can more more easily compared, prioritised and even cancelled if they are deemed unsuitable. 

Initiation Stage Plan (mandatory)

Given the extensive amount of work required to deliver this stage a comprehensive plan is required to cover the period, which could run to a number of weeks or even months - and incur significant expenditure for larger or more complex projects.  This plan is the prelude to the project plan and only outlines the characteristics budget and plan for the Initiation Stage.   

Stakeholder Relationshop Organiser (optional)

This organiser is a useful tool for anyone involved in issuing the project mandate to begin to capture the list of stakeholders that may influence or impact the project.  An initial list would be particularly useful for the project sponsor(s) to have over to the project management team once they are appointed. 

Financial Evaluation (optional)

It is common for projects to be launched by a corporate project management office or on foot of proposals received from third parties. The financial evaluation provides a basis to capture some high-level budgetary forecasts and/or compare options for possible project approaches.