- The Importance of Project Initiation
- The Purpose of the Project Charter
- The Timing and Importance of the Project Manager Assignment
- The Value of Project-Selection Methods
- Using Expert Judgment for Project Initiation
- Management by Objectives
- The Relationship to Planning Activities
- Project Selection Accounting Concepts
- Exam Prep Questions
- Need to Know More?
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
The Relationship to Planning Activities
Because many project managers have limited project initiation experience, and because many organizations have differing views on what project initiation entails, it is not always clear how project initiation relates to project planning. When you review the following list of common project management activities performed during the Initiating phase, you can understand why the line between these two major activities is not clear:
Determining business need
Collecting historical info
Determining project objectives and goals
Resolving conflicting high-level goals
Developing product descriptions
Determining deliverables
Determining process outputs
Documenting constraints
Documenting assumptions
Defining strategies
Identifying performance criteria
Determining resource requirements
Defining budgets
Producing formal documentation
Finalizing and gaining approval of the project charter from stakeholders
In fact, there is considerable overlap in the sets of project management activities. The main point to remember is that many of the initiation activities are further refined during project planning, especially estimating, defining assumptions, and determining deliverables.
TIP
Generally, any planning activity performed during initiation is "high level" and on the order-of-magnitude scale. In other words, the estimates are often reflected on a power-of-10 scale (10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, and so on).