The Principles of Project Management

Next, we come to the project timeline. If the project is one that you're familiar with, you might already have a good idea of rough timelines for the various phases as well as the project overall. If you can, list the major deliverables against the week or month in which they'll be delivered (there's no fine detail here, of course -- you'd really only use a weekly breakdown if the project time was less than three months). In this case, the first two pieces of work are going to define the rest of the timeline, so we're only setting a deadline for these two phases, as Figure 2.5 shows.

Is it Feasible?
In some organizations, the initial analysis of the business processes and investigation of whether to buy or build a system might form what's known as a feasibility study or feasibility project. Rather than starting the full project with such uncertainty, a separate smaller project would be undertaken just to work out whether the main project is worth undertaking, and what would be required if it was.

The last part of the PID outlines the project organization. For this project, we've just pasted in the organization chart that we'd already prepared, as in Figure 2.6. Depending on how much the organization values role descriptions, you might want to put in more detail about what's expected of each individual.

Brief details of assumptions and constraints are often included in the Project Initiation Document. If the feasibility study had been split into a separate project, we would have listed all the assumptions we were making about buying the technical solution as compared to building one. However, since this project is starting with an investigation, these sections are not as important as they might be if we were going straight into the Executing phase.

The Kickoff Meeting

The kickoff meeting is more of a best practice than a tool. It's essentially a meeting at which you bring together the key players in the project to officially get the project started. Usually this will take at least a couple of hours, but you should judge an appropriate timeframe based on the complexity of your project.

The key attendees of the kickoff meeting are the project team and the interested stakeholders. The kickoff meeting is probably the first time that everyone involved will have come together for the project, so it's a great opportunity to get everyone enthused. Since you are (I hope!) working on a project that's important to the future of the organization, you might want to ask the sponsor to say a few words about why he or she thinks the project is important, and what will be achieved, before going into the main discussion points. A typical kickoff meeting agenda might look like this:

• welcome and introduction
• highlights from PID (with a particular focus on the "why" of the project)
• project approach (sharing some of the details of how the project will be managed)
• communication plan (so that everyone knows when they'll hear more)
• plan for moving forward (that is, what will happen in the immediate future)

The fifth point is the one likely to inspire the most debate. Hopefully, through the process of creating the project initiation document (PID), you've ensured that you've captured everyone's opinions about why the project should happen. Conversely, the project approach and communications plan are unlikely to be particularly controversial. But the plan for actually going and tackling the work can inspire rigorous debate!

This is why it's particularly important to have the key stakeholders in the meeting, as well as the team -- it would be a rare project on which you won't need their help and input during the actual project activities, so involving them in some of the initial planning work is a smart move.

Hand Out the PID
The real focus of the kickoff meeting is to get everyone aligned on the initiation of the project, so why not hand out a copy of the Project Initiation Document to every attendee? This will make sure everyone has the same information from which to form expectations of what the project will involve, and how it will work.

Seven Essential Steps for a Successful Initiation

Follow this advice, and you'll drastically increase your chances of running a successful project that makes a real difference!

1. Pick projects that are important to the organization and to its future.


2. Make sure that you have appropriate resources for your project -- whether those include people, equipment, or budget.


3. Include the people who are affected by, and interested in, your project in the project itself -- their inputs and opinions matter!


4. Set up a project board with the necessary members right at the beginning of the project, not just when the difficult decisions need to be made.


5. Create a Project Initiation Document and review it with the project team, board members, and key stakeholders.


6. Get your project started with a kickoff meeting, both to ensure the alignment of stakeholder expectations, and get everyone enthusiastic about the project!


7. Create a communications plan that outlines who needs to be kept informed about your project's progress, and how you're going to communicate with those people.

Summary

In this chapter, we firstly looked at the discovery phase -- how projects are identified and prioritized based on the business value they can deliver, and their relative importance to the future of the organization as a whole. We then considered a discovery tool and a best practice: project proposals and value creation, respectively. The former is a short summary of the project, which can be compared to other project proposals in order to evaluate its priority. Value creation is an important task because unless you know up-front what business benefits you are trying to deliver, you won't know whether or not the project has been successful when you complete it!

Next, we looked at all the people involved in the project, ranging from stakeholders (essentially anyone who's affected by the project) to the project board (which makes the really big decisions) and the project team (those that actually undertake the work). The key tools we discussed included the project organization chart and communication plan.

Finally -- and most importantly -- we looked at actually getting your project off the ground! The key tools we considered were the PID and kickoff meeting. The Project Initiation Document (PID) summarizes the what, why, how, who, and when of the project, so that you can share and agree on these details with the project's stakeholders. The kickoff meeting brings everyone involved together to start the project, helping the stakeholders feel engaged in the project, and demonstrating the commitment of the project board.

Later chapters of this book cover the Planning, Executing, and Controlling phases of the project management lifecycle, managing communication, collaboration, and change, and closing the project -- see the Table of Contents for details, and don't forget to download this chapter in PDF format to read offline.

Create a PID for an Existing Project
Make sure that you familiarize yourself with the tools that we've been talking about. One really good way of coming to terms with these tools is to retrospectively create some of the documents for a project you're currently working on (or one that you've already completed). A great way to start is by creating a project proposal and a PID.