3 Project Initiation, Scope, and Structure
Planning without action is futile. Action without planning is fatal. —Anonymous
Objectives
After reading this lesson, you will be able to
- Define basic terms related to project initiation and explain how the initiation phase fits into a project’s overall life cycle
- Discuss the importance of defining “success” for a project
- Describe the elements of a project charter and explain its role in the initiation phase
- Explain issues related to project scope
- Distinguish between adaptive and technical challenges
- Explain the importance of understanding a project’s context, and the potential for that context to change as you begin the initiation process
The Big Ideas in This Lesson
- To successfully initiate a project, you need to look into the future, through the project’s entire life cycle and anticipate the many issues you might have to deal with. Only then can you clearly define what success means for your project. It’s essential to avoid a purely geometric approach to initiation, that presumes you will simply respond to changing events as they occur, rather than attempting to anticipate them.
- Of the three constraints on project management—scope, budget, and schedule—scope is the most difficult to pin down. Describing it clearly and in detail takes a lot of effort. During initiation, you need to define the project’s scope as clearly as possible, and then refine it as the project unfolds and you learn more about the project and the customer’s needs.
- The potential for changing contexts means that no two projects are the same. Even if you think you’ve completed an identical project recently, you’ll almost certainly find that externalities and differences in context will force you to alter your approach in some way or another.
3.1 Initiation and the Project Life Cycle
Physics tells us that light is both particle and wave. Project management has a similarly dual nature; it is both a series of distinct phases with a clear beginning and end, and a continuous, circular process in which each ending leads to a new beginning. Throughout a project, a successful project manager strives to anticipate changing conditions , rather than simply responding to them as they arise.
Let’s start with the more traditional view, which describes project management as a series of sequential phases, with project initiation coming right after project selection. You can think of these phases, shown in Figure 3-1, as the particle nature of project management.
But while project initiation marks the official beginning of a project, doing it well also requires looking past the making stage to the entire life cycle of the project’s end result. You can think of this as the wave nature of project management. As illustrated in Figure 3-2, the making stage, in which a project is initiated and executed, is one part of the larger cycle that includes the operating/using/changing stage, in which the customer makes use of the project; and the