You’ve written a new procedure.  Your procedure review identified completeness, correctness, and subject matter applicability.  You feel you’ve caught your procedure writing errors and the procedure’s ready to go…but go where?  How do you determine if your new procedure is working?

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Your process is not living up to expectations, so you’ve decided to implement standard operating procedures (SOP) to improve process consistency, compliance, and effectiveness.  However, that project is stalled: employees are not buying into your proposed changes, and management is growing impatient.

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Project Execution, Project Monitoring & Control, and Project Review & Close

The first phase in any project management process is Project Initiation.  The second phase is Project Planning.  Together the first two phases represent the seven “Ps” of planning:

Proper Prior Planning Prevents a Pretty Poor Program.

But you are not preparing planning for planning’s sake, you need the deliverables.  The next phase – Project Execution – is the area most people spend most of their time.

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The first phase in any project management process is project initiation, where the goal is to uncover the project’s scope — the boundaries for resources, expectations, results, feasibility, the team, and your requirements — and produce a project charter.  Now that you know the project’s goals and scope and you have a project charter, what’s next?

Project planning is the second phase of any project management process and consists of developing the core planning elements.  The output of this phase is a set of project management documents, or plans.  The most important one is the project plan itself.  (Figure 1 shows the table of contents for a project plan.)

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Last week, we learned about the five phases of project management.  Each phase of project management has a distinct purpose, importance, and set of outputs designed to ensure that the project manager is moving the project towards the desired results.  The first phase is Project Initiation.

Phase I – Project Initiation

The primary purpose of Project Initiation is to discover the project’s scope — where are its boundaries?  As you see in Figure 1, you need to determine and document the User Requirements & Project Assumptions, produce a Business Case Justification & Feasibility Study, and put together a Project Charter and Project Team.

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