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The remainder of this chapter focuses on each of the stages in turn, looking at what you need to do at each stage and the main project management documents you deal with.

Starting the project

Here are three reasons for including a Starting the Project stage:

✓ You need to know whether the project is worth doing. Unfortunately, not all ideas are good ones. Rather than rushing into full planning, first look at whether the idea makes sense before committing more to it.

✓ You need to get basic information together. You won’t find it easy to plan the project if you haven’t established, at least in an outline, what the project is, what resource is available and any constraints, such as on delivery dates.

✓ You can sketch out the idea for the project and get agreement before going on to full planning. If you leap straight in to full planning, you often discover that disagreement arises when people check the plans, because they have different ideas about the project even though they’re using the same words.

In the Starting the Project stage, you need to go fast. A common mistake is confusing Starting the Project with the next stage, Organising and Preparing, which takes a while. The Starting the Project stage need only take up a couple of days or maybe just a few hours of your time, even if the project is fairly substantial.

In the Starting the Project stage, you consider roughly what the project is and whether it’s worth continuing to the next stage to do the full planning. You look at six key areas:

✓ Objective: What exactly is the objective of the project? To save money perhaps, or speed up ordering procedures? You need to ensure your objective(s) are clear, so that the project can be agreed on.

✓ Scope: What’s the project intended to cover and, usefully, what won’t it cover if some areas are unclear? What will the project finally deliver?

✓ Resource: How much do you expect the project to cost? Be realistic here. How much staff resource will the project need, and will it require particular skills? The resource figures are very much ballpark ones at the moment because the planning has yet to be done.

✓ Time: How long is the project likely to take, on the assumption that resources can be provided when needed? Again, this is a ballpark estimate.

✓ Justification: Why do you want to run the project? Perhaps this is a no-brainer because the project is mandatory – head office has instructed that each regional office runs a project to review its local client base. Normally, though, the project is justified because of benefits, such as greater market penetration, lower costs or faster customer service.

✓ Constraints: Will anything influence the way that the project is run, or even what it delivers and when? For example, it might be time critical. You should also think about the required quality level of the project, such as whether it’s ‘quick and dirty’, safety critical or, usually, somewhere in between.

To document the Starting the Project stage you put the information you find out in a Project Outline that others (such as steering committee members) can read and then approve or reject. However, don’t get too detailed. Although the information is in a document, you might discuss the content in a meeting or give a short presentation to the decision-makers and hand out the document as a backup.

Organising and preparing

Ah, so the members of the steering committee loved the idea, did they? Well done on your presentation of the Project Outline. Okay, on with the next stage then: Roll up your sleeves and get down to the real work of project planning.

The Organising and Preparing stage gets you ready for the delivery stages of the project. It covers the overall planning of the project and also the detailed planning of the first delivery stage. If the sponsor or steering committee says ‘go’ at the end of the Organising and Preparing stage, the first delivery stage can start immediately, because the detailed plan for it is already in place.

When thinking through this stage, balance the work very carefully. A major cause of project failure is poor plans or a complete lack of plans. However, the answer to that problem isn’t to go to the other extreme of developing excessively detailed plans for everything. Over-planning just wastes time now, and then again as the plans are maintained throughout the project. Remember to provide sufficient information to define and control the project, but not more than that.

Developing a high-level plan first, then a more detailed Stage Plan as you approach each delivery stage, gives you good control over a project. Start simple and only get complicated where really necessary in order to provide sufficient checks and direction over the project.

Knowing what’s ahead

For the detailed planning work, you investigate a number of areas, and usually that means consulting other people. Some areas can be expanded from the Project Outline.

✓ Scope: When a project gets the green light, it’s time to hone the scope. The scope says exactly what the project will cover and deliver, and also what it won’t cover. Chapter 2 has more on writing the scope.

✓ Business Case: The Business Case sets out the full justification of the project, including its costs, and also defines the business benefits that the project will deliver and the way in which those benefits will be measured. See Chapter 2 for much more on the Business Case.

✓ Project Plan: The Project Plan is a high-level plan of the delivery stages and closure stage, although the closure stage can be tentative at this point. The Project Plan sets down what the project will deliver, the activities, and the staff resource and finance involved. Chapters 4 to 7 give lots of practical advice on planning and some really powerful techniques to help.

✓ Risk: You should look at the risk involved in the project and also the means of controlling it. Chapter 8 helps with some useful techniques. Some people question whether you really need risk management in every project, even the very small ones. Yes, you do.

✓ Quality: In the Project Outline you already indicated the quality level needed for this project. Now is the time to establish exactly how you’ll carry the quality through into the deliverables, what degree of control you need to exercise, and how you’ll audit to make sure that the required quality has been delivered. Chapter 4 has more.

✓ Roles and responsibilities: Who needs to do what in the project? You may have decided on this earlier in the Starting the Project stage, but it’s worth setting down formal roles and responsibilities now, with any adjustments. In that way, everyone involved knows what they should be doing on the project and, importantly, what everyone else should be doing. That helps avoid communications problems where things fall down the gaps. You can read much more on roles and project organisation in Chapters 9 and 10.

✓ Communications: You need to think through communications carefully, because this area can cause major headaches. Chapter 11 provides guidelines.

✓ Controls: For a very small project, don’t get carried away, because you probably won’t need many controls at all. In a larger project, though, you need to think through controls carefully, as we explain in Chapter 11.

Thinking about management documents