Not to be confused with Initiating a Project, this process does the groundwork on which successful initiation depends. You'll need to do this to the extent necessary in your organisation to ensure that
- you know who's on the Project Management Team
- you know who the project manager is going to be, at least for the initiation stage
- you know what the Project Brief is, so that everyone knows what project is going to be initiated in the initiation process.
- you know how it's going to be done - the Project Approach
- and there is a Business Case for the project
- there is a plan for the initiation stage of the project
In theory, this process should happen only as a result of a Project Mandate being produced by the business, setting out the reasons for doing the project and the expected outcome. In practice, the mandate may be no more than a memo or email, or may be a document which has done all the groundwork mentioned above. Somebody's got to do this work - to the extent necessary - and it's often the project manager who has to assemble all the elements.
Once all the elements are complete, they are passed to the project board for approval and their authorisation to proceed with Initiation
