WHAT -------------- A helpful guide for Project Management Professionals who are at the beginning of their projects in 'Project Initiation'. FOR -------------- Written in plain English for use in the real world (not just for study). If you're a professional who's rusty on Initiation or have fallen into bad habits - this guide will remind you what questions to ask,...and why! BY -------------- Daniel Mccrea a PRINCE2(R) and PMP(R) certified Project Manager specialising in online Software/ & Content Delivery. Visit me here: ie.linkedin.com/in/danielmccrea/

1. To The User…
The below deck can be used for two purposes:
-> As a checklist ahead of meeting your Project Sponsor or Program Manager to ensure you have all of the information
you need to perform effectively.
-> With customisation, as a deck to work through during a Project Kick Off Meeting or Workshop.
It is not intended as a study tool for revision for the PMP®
Exam.
I have relied heavily on:
-> The standout book for PMP Exam Preparation: Rita Mulcahy’s PMP Exam Prep 8th
Edition Buy
-> The training I received from the VelopiLink
team in Ireland.
-> My own experience over 9 years of Project Management.
Feedback:
-> I welcome any feedback you have, please leave a comment below or email me at daniel (dot) mcrea (at) gmail (dot)
com.
Daniel McCrea (PMP®
, PRINCE2®
)
ie.linkedin.com/in/danielmccrea/
“
.”

2. Project Initiation
[Project Name]
[Meeting Date/Time/Venue]
[Your Name] – Project Manager – [Your Department]
[Company
Logo]
2

3. Project Lifecycle
Pre-Production
Project Initiation
Develop Project Charter, Identify Stakeholders.
Planning
Develop Management Plans: Project | Communication | Scope | Quality | HR | Risk | Procurements
Collect Requirements, Define Scope, Schedule and Sequence Activities, Estimate Costs.
Production
Executing
Direct & Manage Project Execution, Perform QA, Acquire Project Team, Develop Project Team, Manage
Project Team, Distribute Information, Manage Stakeholder Expectations, Conduct Procurements.
Monitoring and Controlling
Monitor and Control Project Work, Perform Integrated Change Control, Verify Scope, Control Schedule,
Control Scope, Perform Quality Control, Report on Performance, Monitor and Control Risks, Administer
Procurements.
Post-Production
Closing
Close Project (or Project Phase), Close Procurements.
3

4. Project Initiation
Pre-Production
Project Initiation
Develop Project Charter, Identify Stakeholders.
Planning
Develop Management Plans: Project | Communication | Scope | Quality | HR | Risk | Procurements
Collect Requirements, Define Scope, Schedule and Sequence Activities, Estimate Costs.
Production
Executing
Direct & Manage Project Execution, Perform QA, Acquire Project Team, Develop Project Team,
Manage Project Team, Distribute Information, Manage Stakeholder Expectations, Conduct
Procurements.
Monitoring and Controlling
Monitor and Control Project Work, Perform Integrated Change Control, Verify Scope, Control
Schedule, Control Scope, Perform Quality Control, Report on Performance, Monitor and
Control Risks, Administer Procurements.
Post-Production
Closing
Close Project (or Project Phase), Close Procurements.
4

5. The Project Charter* outlines the basis for executing the
project, who is responsible for its success and what that
means. Without it you risk:
(a) The purpose of the project will stay ambiguous and open
to competing interests with confusion, conflict and ultimately
project failure as real outcomes.
(b) No agreed yardstick by which to measure when the
project is complete and whether it was a success.
*Note: It does not matter what this document is called, the point is this: If you cannot create
a document, with adequate signoff, that agrees the absolute basics – your project is already
in trouble.
 Project Charter | Risk 
5

6. Q: What are the inputs you should look for when developing the Project Charter?
Before you can meaningfully develop the Project Charter you need to read and understand:
Pre-Production | Integration
Develop Project Charter, Identify Stakeholders
Project Initiation
6
Input What you need to know as a Project Manager
Statement of Work Why are we doing this project at all? What’s the high-level scope? What problem are we solving?
Business Case Why are we doing this project over other projects? What kind of analysis informed the decision:
Financial: Increased Revenue or Decreased Expenditure
Nonfinancial: Customer loyalty, innovation, competitive advantage.
Agreements
/
Contracts
What contracts are already in place? What is the escalation process? What are the mechanisms and
penalties for non-performance? What are the agreed deliverables and the deadlines? Remember,
nobody works for free so if X is not in the contract, X will cost you money!
Strategic Plan Is this project aligned to a higher company strategy? What is that strategy?
Environmental
Factors
These are things external to the project which you can’t control but need to understand: Culture and
Attitude of the Company.
Legal or Regulatory Standards you are bound to.
Market Landscape – What are the threats & opportunities?
Organisational
Process Assets
Existing company tools, software, templates, policies, standards, processes and methodologies you are
expected to follow/use.

7. Q: What is the status of Project Charter?
-> If incomplete, can I help to finish it? If signed off, can you please send me a copy?
-> What format should it take? How long should it be? Remember the more succinct the more likely it is to be read.
Q: Is it comprehensive?
-> The charter should include, at a minimum, this information:
- Executive Summary: A high-level summary of the Business Case which justifies Project Approval.
Example: We anticipate this this will reduce customer complaints, which currently cost the company 200,000USD a year, considerably less than the project budget.
- Title and Description: What is the project in broad terms? What is it called?
Example: “The K-2 Playbook” Usage levels of our new tool are chronically low creating a dip in data integrity. The Playbook will reinforce user training with a view to
improving data integrity in the tool by 15% in 6 Months.
- Project Manager and Authority Level: Who is the project lead? What authority does the Project Manager have?
You cannot assume that you have authority to drive the project per the PMP manual; the ‘Project Manager’ may be a junior role under a ‘Program Lead’.
Example: Martin is the Project Manager on CSI and has authority to select team members and determine the final project budget.
- Product Description: What specific product features are required?
Example: Must achieve a 20% reduction in Purchase through time. Must be compatible with all supported OS & Devices. Available in English & Spanish for Phase
One. Unless you have these explicitly documented you have no yardstick by which to measure if the project was a failure or a success.
- High-Level Project Risks: (Potential threats and opportunities for the project)
Example: Risk - Because we are executing this project concurrently with other projects with higher priority, resources bandwidth may present an issue.
Opportunity – We can take the user-cases from this project and use them as inputs for the QA project that Jane is starting in 3 months.
- Assumptions: What do we think is true and that we all agree to?
Example: We have the technical skills in-house to execute this work. There is no need for additional Hardware. Resources have the bandwidth to commit to this
project.
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8. - Project Approval Requirements (What items need to be approved for the project, and who will have sign-off? What designates
success?)
Example: Sponsors will sign off Project Charter before planning efforts continue, Finance will provide capital authorisation before resources are engaged, Sponsors
will provide high-level risks before planning continues. Program manager will provide signoff for individual costs over $10k or in case project goes over budget by
5%
- Constraints: What factors may limit our ability to deliver? What boundaries or parameters will the project have to function within?
Example: We must be ready for the peak sales season starting 10 Nov, our budget is capped at $10,000USd with a $3,000 Management Reserve and ISO 9000
compliant.
- Measurable Project Objectives: How does the project tie into the organization's strategic goals? What project objectives support
those goals? The objectives need to be measurable and will depend on the defined priority of the project constraints.
Example: Project must complete no later than 1st
Sep, Budget is $50,000, Achieve an average reduction of 40% to transaction time.
- Stakeholders: Who can impact the project? Who can be positively or negatively impacted by the project?
Example: Sarah Jones representing Sales, John Smith in Human Resources and Alison Hughes in QA.
- Resources Pre-Assigned: What resources have already been assigned to the project team? Who from operational services will
support?
Example: Mike Jones from I.T. and Steve from Platform are already dedicated to project due to experience delivering similar project last year. We have already
engaged an outside vendor to wireframe the application.
- What is Out of Scope?
During the course of a project’s maturation various options and features will have been considered and rejected. Its helpful to capture this ideas graveyard so
that its clear to everyone that X is definitely off the table.
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9. - Milestone Schedule
Note: You have not completed Project Planning nor identified all dependencies yet so resist getting locked in to this date as much as possible. If your stakeholders
are unsympathetic to this point I recommend you to do two things: Log all of the assumptions that underpin hitting this date and start asking the question: “What
will it take to hit date X?” not “ How long will it take you to do X?”.
- Project Sponsors Authorizing This Project: Sponsors should add their signature to the bottom of the Project Charter.
Note: The purpose of the charter is ultimately to authorise the spending of time and money on a project. Alarm bells should go off if you cannot locate or confirm
the existence of a formal signoff of the project.
Q: How/Where will the Charter be Stored and Version-Controlled?
-> Do not allow the charter to be fired back and forth as an attachment until the version control collapses completely. Take control of the
charter and agree a centralised storage location (SharePoint/eRooms/GoogleDocs)
-> Ensure that everyone has the appropriate access permissions to Read and/or Edit the document.
Q: What is the deadline for signoff?
-> By definition, senior Stakeholders have many tasks competing for their time and securing signoff can be…challenging. Until your charter is
signed off your project doesn’t officially exist so this is a blocker to you and the clock is running. Consider “I will assume your sign off on the
attached by 16th
” rather than “Please can you review and add comments so that we can move towards signoff by the 16th
?”
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10. If you fail to identify all Stakeholders at initiation you risk:
(a) Missing key requirements they may have of your
project.
(b) Losing out on the benefit of their expertise and the risks
they can identify that nobody else can.
(c) Antagonising them – who likes to be ignored?
(d) Having a highly influential ‘surprise’ stakeholder appear
during project close with a series of ‘new’ requirements
which can blow your budget and your schedule.
This is your fault not theirs.
10
 Stakeholders| Risk 

11. Q: Who are the Stakeholders? (See Appendix 1 for a template register).
-> Remember a stakeholder is anyone who is impacted positively or negatively by the project. Fail to document and communicate with those
negatively impacted by your project at your peril. (Eg: Your Project impacts the Engineering Resource Manager by creating a bottleneck on
resource with another project. Keep this influential person on side by communicating with them and cooperating as best you can.)
-> You are expected to help identify and document the Stakeholders as part of active project management. This information will likely not be
handed to you on a plate. You are responsible for the success of the project, so you need to be sure no gaps have been left. Finishing an email
with “Forward this on as necessary to the Stakeholders” doesn’t cut it. Check the procurement contracts, check the Project Charter, ask around.
-> On a large software development project, for example, you would expect to see representatives from Requirements Analysis, Vendor Mgmt.,
Engineering, Release, Quality Assurance, Marketing/Sales, Senior Project Sponsor, Customer Support, Audio-visual, Creative Design, Human
Resources.
Example: You did not include the Sales team during initiation. Two months before the project is expected to close you get a phone-call from the VP
of marketing asking if everything is ready for the big sales demo tomorrow? That’s your fault, not theirs!
Note: You can use the stakeholder register as the basis for your communications Management Plan (In Project Planning Phase).
Q: What is their role on the project?
-> If the person’s contribution to the project is not immediately clear from their job title – make sure you drill down and find out what function they
are actually performing. It’s ok to ask, its not ok to not know.
Q: Where are they on the influence matrix? (See Appendix 2 for a template matrix).
-> You might think that completing an influence matrix is OTT. Irrespective of whether you use a matrix or not, effective management means
focussing on the High importance & High influence Stakeholders instead of being distracted by the squeaky wheel at the bottom. How can you tell
which is which unless you have this conversation with your manager?
Q: What are their expectations?
-> Unless you have an unusually long planning phase, you cannot expect to document the expectations of every stakeholder. However, if you
have a handle on the influence matrix you should conduct interviews with the key Stakeholders to capture their expectations. Asking for
‘expectations’ is a good way to extract implicit requirements and can be helpful to identify icebergs: Everyone might agree on the details, but
might have fundamentally different high level expectations.
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12. Q: What are their interests?
-> Do you like interesting work? So do Stakeholders! The first step to engaging Stakeholders is to find their interests and, where possible, allow them
to pursue them.
Example: The QA lead sees this as another boring business-as-usual project. During your conversation, however, she mentions she has always been
interested in X (The Scoping Phase, The Marketing Strategy, Storyboarding…) - Is there a way you can include her in these meetings as an observer
if not a contributor? Can you include her on something that lesser Project Managers wouldn’t bother?
Q: Does the company already have a template you can use?
-> Highly projectised companies will have templates which you should seek out from PMO.
-> See if a fellow PM has a completed one from a previous project you can recycle. This will help you to identify gaps in your understanding.
Q: How often should you revise the Stakeholder register?
-> Things change. People leave. Use your expert judgement to see how often you re-visit the stakeholder charter.
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13. 13
[appendices]

14. Stakeholder Register
Project Initiation: Appendix 1
Name Title Department/Company Supervisor Contact Info.
Main
Responsibilities
Notes
Daniel Mccrea Project Manager PMO Office / Acme Mary Smith e: daniel.mccrea@x.com
p: +353 1 888 8888 Ext.# 451
Requirements Analysis
Vendor Management
Engineering
Product Release
Quality Assurance
Marketing/Sales
Senior Project Sponsor
Customer Support
Audio-Visual
Creative Design
…
14

15. Sarah Jones
Stakeholder Matrix
15
Project Initiation: Appendix 2
Sarah Jones
Mark Smith
Anthony Balder
Dan Azera
Sarah Jones
Martin Kampnall

Make Sure you keep people in
this corner informed, engaged
and happy they are Highly
Influential and Highly
Important
Eric Styles
Tony Watson

Don’t let the Squeaky Wheels
on the project eat up your
time with minor queries and
complaints.

16. 16
[end]