Activities of the starting up a Project Process

There a six activities in this process as mentioned below:

• Appoint the Executive and the Project Manager

• Capture previous lessons

• Designed and appoint the Project Management team

• Prepare the outline business case

• Select the project approach and assemble the project brief

• Plan the initiations stage

Appoint the executive and the project manager

To get anything done in the project, a decision maker with appropriate authority is required and the executive represents the interests of the business stakeholders. The appointment of a project manager allows for the project to be managed on a day to day basis on behalf of the executive. The daily log is used for all sort of things throughout the project and in the early stages we can also do things like put issues, risks and so on. So, appoint the Executive and the Project Manager.

PRINCE2 recommends to review the project mandate:

• Establish the responsibilities for the executives

• Prepare the role description for the executive

• Estimate the time and effort required for the role

• Identify candidates and select the most appropriate person for the role

• Confirm the selected persons availability and their commitment to carry it out and assign the selected person to the role of executive

• Provide to the project mandate

The executive role description is created by corporate program management and the appointed executive is confirmed by corporate or program management.

Capture previous lessons

Review the lessons from corporate management, program management, and external organizations. Consult with individuals or teams with previous experience of similar projects and appropriate record of these lessons in the lessons log for this project, make sure you're familiar with all other things happening in this relatively straight forward activity. The project manager is the producer of the lessons log.

Design and appoints the Project Management team

The project requires the right people in the right place with the authority, responsibility and knowledge to make decisions in a timely manner. The project management team need to reflect the interests of all parties who will be involved, including business, user and supplier interests. The project manager is responsible for updating the daily report creating the project management team role, descriptions and the project management team structure. The last two of those will be approved by an executive and then the executive will confirm the appointment of the project management team and that will need to be approved by corporate or program manager.

To prepare the outline Business Case

The business case states why the work is worth doing and as such is a crucial element of the project. The outline business case is likely to be only a high-level view at this time. It provides an agreed foundation for more extensive business case developed in initiating a project process. The project manager will be responsible for creating a project product description and for updating the daily log.

Selects the project approach and assemble the project brief

Before planning of the project can be done, decisions must be made regarding how the work of the project is going to be approached, the way in which the work is going to be conducted. And this is captured in the project brief as part of what's called the project approach.

Select the project approach

Depending on what the project is about that may be fundamental decisions to take such as, whether we are going to develop something by ourselves or perhaps get something developed by a third party. For example our business is making products, are we going to modify one of the products rewarding we've created something you all together and although the absolute detail of this won't be known at this stage is very important that the general approach with as much detail as it is realistic is actually established as part of the project brief

The project definition includes number of things such as the background, the project objectives, desired outcome, scope and exclusions, constraints and assumptions. Go through the product description outline for project brief in a Doc 19 to know what goes in there but basically you're making sure at this point that you have a pretty complete project brief. There are various risks that may come to light so it may well be necessary to do some more updates to the daily log but at the end of this activity the project brief is in place that turns of responsibilities.

The project manager also prepares additional role descriptions and project brief. Note that we have project assurance roles now review roles by whoever is responsible for project assurance and then of course the project manager is responsible for any updates to the daily log

Plan the initiation stage

Initiating a project takes time and consumes, resources the work should be planned and approved. Basically, the project manager is going to produce the stage plan for the initiation stage and this will include any constraints or costs associated with that stage. The project manager will use the project brief to get all the information needed to put together that initiation stage plan and will then refer to the daily log lessons will get sector for any information that might help to put the stage plan together. This activity will generate for the updates to the daily log in the form of new risks but ultimately once the stage plan has been produced that would generate a request to initiate a project and that is the ultimate output of the starting up a project process.