How To Start Your Projects Right. A Complete Guide To Project Initiation

The beginning of a project: the calm before the storm or a manic rush to get things sorted ready for the core work to start? Whichever way it happens, the start of a project is critical to its future success. From estimating and scoping, to assigning resource, defining requirements, briefing in your team, the all important first meeting with the client — there’s a minefield of tasks out there which can shape how your project develops. You have to set the tone for success.

I’m going to arm you with the tools and information you need to kick your projects off in the right way, so that your project starts off right and hopefully eases the future path (NB I cannot guarantee what factors happen after!)

I’m going to walk you through the core aspects of the project initiation phase, how to protect against future challenges, set the right expectations and also look at some areas to focus on that can really help you to succeed later. I’ve added lots of links to further reading if you want to delve deeper into topics. Also, you can then get a handy project initiation checklist to refer to at the start of any project.

What Is The Project Initiation Phase?

Firstly, what is Project Initiation? Let’s talk about the life cycle of a project. Whatever your chosen methodology or process, every project has to start somewhere. Any project generally has five steps to it: Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring & Controlling and Closing. The initiating phase is the first phase, where the project is kicked off, both with your team and with any clients and stakeholders. Any information you have (e.g. from pitch stage, from the client, from any background research) is gathered together in order to set and define the project’s scope, timings and cost. This is the core set up for your project where you identify the stakeholders, the team, goals and objectives and deliverables.

How To Start A Project And What Do I Need To Do In The Project Initiation Phase?

The outcome of the Project Initiation phase is generally one of two documents (or sometimes both!): the Project Initiation Document (PID) and the Statement of Work (SoW). A good way to focus on your Project Initiation and to really drill-down on what you need to outline for your project and for one of these two documents, is to work through it in terms of three areas: People, Processes and Product. These are central to any project.

People

Let’s start with the most important, people! Well, you aren’t going to create anything without them, are you?!

1. Team

Planning Your Team Shape

In the Project Initiation phase, you need to define and set up your team. Firstly, review your project and deliverables and work out what team shape you need. Check availability, and get your resource provisionally booked in. When you’re thinking about who to book on a project however, don’t just look at availability — you really need to think about what skills you need to deliver your project successfully. Think about the client or stakeholders here too: how will your team members work with them? Run through the following checklist when forming your team:

• Skills (what will they need to do)
• Experience (what will they need to have worked on before)
• Stakeholders (how will they need to communicate)
• Availability (will they have to the time to dedicate)
• Budget (can you afford them)

Remember, don’t do this in isolation. Speak to the varying discipline leads if you have them, make sure you aren’t making assumptions on your own. It’s good to hold a quick meeting with the leads upfront, to run through the project and deliverables and get their help in outlining the resource requirements. Working through the above should give you a team shape for your project, but remember to leave some contingency time after planning this before proper project kick-off in case you need to look outside your organisation for the right skill-set to freelancers or contractors perhaps.

Further reading: 10 Resource Management Software & Resource Scheduling Software Tools

Getting The Team Involved: Kicking Off The Right Way

It’s good to precede any client kick-off, with an internal kick-off session. This helps to get their buy-in and involvement in the project early. When setting requirements, team shape, and objectives, always remember that it’s best keeping people involved and aware. Whilst you don’t want to add loads of overhead (and it’s often tricky to get people involved when they are busy!), the best way to kick-off a project in the right way is to set and manage expectations early. By getting your team involved upfront, they will feel more included and involved in the decision making and therefore have a much more positive impression of the project as a whole.

So hold an internal kick-off session. Set up a meeting, with a good agenda (always make sure a meeting is useful and for the right people) and run through the background to the project, any objectives and goals, and requirements that are already set. Something I’ve found useful is to leave space at the end of the meeting for a more workshop-like forum to gather team thoughts. Some good areas to discuss and raise early are:

• How do the team want to work?
• How and when should the team get client or stakeholder feedback?
• How do the team want to communicate with the client or stakeholder feedback?
• What regular meetings should the team have internally? When should these be?
• Should catch-ups be ad-hoc and informal, or more planned in?

Like I said, getting team involvement in decision-making upfront is likely to cause them to feel much more invested with the project as a whole. Getting this meeting in before the SoW is completed can help feed the team’s proposed ways of working into the document, making it much more relevant to how the project is actually going to run.

Further reading: How to run a great internal project kickoff meeting

2. Stakeholders

Defining Who Is Involved And When

As part of Project Initiation, outline and define the stakeholder involvement. Whether this is client or internal stakeholders, it’s really important to be clear on who is doing tasks, signing off deliverables or reviewing and feeding back. Creating a RACI is a great way to do this. I’ve written an article which dives into the world of the RACI and helps you create a RACI that is useful and can be used. Take a look here and download a free RACI matrix as an added bonus!

Setting Project Communications

As part of the SoW or PID it’s useful to define when and how communications will take place with the stakeholders. After creating your RACI, review what you feel is necessary for updates and meetings with your core stakeholders. If there is a clear project lead client-side, then starting out with how often you formally update them is a good way to approach this. Then widen this out to others in the team and when their involvement should be. List out your project updates you feel are necessary, then fill out the who and when.

Further reading: How To Create A Project Communication Plan

Stakeholder Kick-Off Meeting

Firstly, make sure you’ve had your internal kick-off meeting before this. Don’t throw team members into a meeting about a project they know nothing about. Also, it’s good to have already introduced yourself to the client or stakeholders involved prior to the meeting, either over the phone or ideally in person. Make sure you have a clear agenda, and aren’t inviting the whole world to the meeting. Always remember to keep a meeting contained and relevant.

Things to run through in the meeting:

• Introductions
• Roles and responsibilities
• Deliverables
• Assumptions
• Risks
• Dependencies
• Timings
• Costs
• Team shape

Further reading: How to run a great client project kick off meeting; Kickoff Meeting: The Complete Guide To Starting Projects Right

3. And don’t forget about… you!

Don’t forget about you within all of this! It’s easy to focus on stakeholders, clients and your team over yourself, but it’s important to make sure your expectations are set right for this project. Have a think through what you want to get out of your project, and your objectives and try to plan some ways you can achieve them throughout the course of it.

Process

Ah process, one of the things most DPMs love to talk about! It’s important to set out the process for your project at the beginning so there are clear perimeters for you and your team (and client) to follow. However, avoid becoming too bogged down in processes, documentations and rules. Sometimes process is the fastest way to kill a team’s enthusiasm! There are some core areas to set out when you initiate a project.

1. Methodology

The age old obsession in project management — which methodology to follow? This might be clear already by how your client works, or how your agency or team are set up for example. Ideally though, you review the project, deliverables, team and then find a process that will suit the needs. Often it’s a blended mix of different methodologies — don’t be worried by this, always think what is best for the project rather than trying to force it to fit a certain methodology. Think about the following things when considering the methodology:

• What is the size of your project?
• How fixed are the scope, timings and budget?
• What team do you have to work on it?
• Do you have a full-time team or are they shared with other projects?
• How does the client currently work?
• Will you have a fully invested client project lead?

Using answers to the above questions, you should be able to have a clearer idea of what type of project it is and therefore how it should be run. For example if all scope, timings and budget are set this will be more Waterfall, or if you have a full-time dedicated team with a fully invested client project lead this could lend itself more to an Agile-style project.

Further reading:

• I’ve written an article about methodologies, focusing on Scrum and Waterfall, and discussing how to make hybrids work: Agile vs Waterfall. What Should You Use For Your Project?
• Also check this out for an overview: 9 Project Management Methodologies Made Simple

2. Tools

Another PM obsession, what are the right tools to use for the project? Well, again, this really depends on your project. As I’ve said throughout, avoid too heavy processes and this is the same for tools — avoid throwing lots of unnecessary tools into the mix. Some areas to consider when selecting what tools you need are:

• Resource planning and management e.g. Harvest or Traffic
• Project planning and managing timescales e.g. Microsoft Project or Smartsheet
• Communication to stakeholders e.g. Google Sheets or Confluence
• Managing internal tasks e.g. Jira or Trello

Personally, I’m all for keeping things simple and often find myself using Google Sheets for a lot of things. Whichever tools you use, ensure your internal team and stakeholders are in agreement, and know how to use them effectively. Avoid over-complicating things, and you can always refine the tools later in the project if you find things aren’t working.

Further reading:

• 15 Project Management Software Tools
• Weighing Project Management Tools? Balance These Top 3 Criteria

3. Risks

Thinking ahead is one of the best things that you can do in the Project Initiation phase when you start a project. Establishing risks that might keep the project from delivering is extremely important to do upfront. Create a RAID log to highlight Risks, Assumptions, Issues and Dependencies, and also work through how you will mitigate these. Make sure you involve your team, and consider holding a pre-mortem session with your team where you brainstorm areas of risk, as they are often likely to come up with things you haven’t even thought of.

Further reading: 10 tips for project success: manage risk

Product

Finally, the product — what you are creating. There are some core areas here that need to be set within the Project Initiation phase.

1. Requirements

Firstly, what are the requirements for your project? Before kicking off the project properly and gathering requirements in the planning stage, it’s good to outline what you know already. What are the business, client and user needs for what you are creating? This helps you to have a clear understanding of the background and context for the project.

2. Scope And Deliverables

At this stage of the project, you have an idea of what the deliverables are. Now’s the time to start fleshing this out, and putting some perimeters around them, in order to be able to agree to these in the SoW or PID.

3. Setting Deliverables

Taking the information you have, organise an internal meeting to go through the deliverables with your team. If your team isn’t yet in place and you need to push forward with setting the deliverables, meet with the discipline leads. Make sure you get people to feed into these, don’t determine these in isolation! When you review with your team, make sure you have these areas in mind to review per deliverable:

• What is it?
• What format will it be in?
• Will rounds of amends be necessary?
• Who will be involved?
• When should this be delivered?
• Does it have dependencies on any other deliverables?

4. Budgets And Timings

Following on from your list of deliverables, you now have a rough project scope and need to put timings and roles against this. Work with your discipline leads to estimate timings and the team shape against this. Dependent on process, you might be estimating in Sprints or in phases with sign offs. Make sure you work with the team on these, to set the right perimeters. Again, don’t force a process onto a project, make sure the process fits the project. Agree the team shape, and then put costs against this. At this stage, for the PID or SoW, you don’t need a detailed breakdown of timings but more an overview of phases of time.

Further reading:

• How To Estimate Projects: The Complete Guide To Project Budget & Cost Estimation
• How To Create The Perfect Project Plan. The Definitive Guide

5. Measures Of Success

What is your project or product without success? But what does success even mean? Don’t forget that your project also needs some sort of measurement, so that you can review and understand where things worked or didn’t work, and how successfully you delivered. Create some measurement criteria that you’ll review at the end (or at certain stages along the project). Consider areas such as:

• Core KPIs e.g. increasing visitors to a site
• Client satisfaction i.e. how happy were the client with how the project went?
• Team satisfaction i.e. how happy were the team with how the project went?
• Timings variance
• Budget variance

Further reading: 5 Ways To Measure Project Success

Read the full article to learn more:
- 5 core challenges when initiating projects — and how to overcome them
- Top ten tips to remember when initiating a project
- Project initiation checklist

Originally published at www.thedigitalprojectmanager.com on June 19, 2018.