Project Initiation

The Project initiation phase helps to ensure your project aligns with the organizations strategic direction and authorizes the development work to begin. Regardless of your methodology, there needs to be an initiation process to ensure your project is feasible and will address business needs. Agile and waterfall projects need some form of business justification, stakeholder engagement, and authorization to begin work.

The initiation project phase involves data gathering to understand the customer’s requirements, proposing a business case to build a viable solution, stakeholder analysis, understanding high-level risks and setting realistic customer expectations for a reasonable project outcome.

Business Case: The business case represents the feasibility for investing resources in a proposed project. It’s a forecast that tells the business if the project will provide a return on investment. However, not every project needs to provide an ROI, specifically in cases of legal, compliance, or non-tangible reasons. The business case is needed to provide a general understanding for the costs, resources, and reasons for the project and should be used for projects with large financial investments.

Project Charter: The project charter is the starting point for project planning. It authorizes the project manager to use resources to execute on the projects scope and objectives. It’s a formal document that describes the vision, scope, high-level timeline, and expectations for the project. The project charter is always recommended as a line in the sand and should be used for both waterfall and agile projects.

Stakeholder Register: The stakeholder register is used to document anyone who is impacted or has a vested interest in the project. It includes business stakeholders, customers, users, and others who are involved with the project. It’s recommended to develop a stakeholder register very early in the project to understand who is involved. Good project management practices include communication and transparency. The stakeholder register allows you to understand certain characteristics of your stakeholders.

Templates

We offer downloadable templates to help you get started, focusing on value delivery and successful outcomes. In order to measure value delivery for any project, a product vision, expectations, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) need to be defined. Project initiation does just that – it includes creating a vision, expectations, and aligning a project team to deliver on expectations.