Collaborative Project Initiation: Setting the Stage for Success

I have been managing projects for decades and in that time have had the opportunity to work with some amazing teams and had some great mentors. I moved into coaching and mentoring over a decade ago to take the stress out of my life as well as share the best practices I’ve learned with younger PMs and organizations looking to empower project teams and utilize more collaboration.

Annie MacLeod
We’d want to start out with a definition of project initiation – I view this as the stage when we’re determining if there is a project and what it needs to achieve. This stage typically begins because of either a strategic initiative or a business problem that needs to be fixed. Unfortunately, this can also start as an executive edict without the clear definition of a strategic goal, or business problem. When this stage is done incompletely or not at all it can result in a project that is a solution looking for a problem, it typically has cost over runs and significant delays as the project team hunts for what should have been defined when it was initiated. It is also often plagued with constant change requests as multiple stakeholders search for clarity on the project scope. I look at the project lifecycle having four stages – initiation, planning, project delivery and closure – typically initiation is the domain of the senior leaders of the organization and often a Project Manager isn’t assigned until the planning or delivery begins.

I use the term collaboration throughout my project practices and the PMGameboard. These are methods that harness the knowledge of the team whether it’s their specialized technical knowledge or organizational knowledge. When collaboration is done well in a psychologically safe environment it can accelerate a team’s ability to deliver as well as make them more resilient and adaptable in our fast-paced world.

Annie MacLeod
Project initiation is all about ensuring that the organization is committing its resources to the projects that will generate the best benefits. This can be their capital resources as well as human resources. To do that you need to understand the context of each project as well as have decision makers involved in the process. Key elements are:

– Getting the right people in the room. In the initiation phase this means having people of the right authority level to make decisions that commit organizational resources, have insights into the strategic plan and/or corporate direction and priorities, as well as knowledge about the organizations resource capacity in terms of knowledge, and expertise.

– Having an agreed standard process to assess projects in two ways – relative to their value to the organization as well as relative to each other. This ensures that the organization is spending its resources on the right projects for the right reasons.

Annie MacLeod
I recommend a series of workshops to understand projects at this stage – usually it can be accomplished in two meetings. The first workshop is to understand project priorities and desired outcomes. Once those are agreed to by senior leaders then some project delivery folks can get involved to do a high-level scoping of key deliverables.

Annie MacLeod
This stage of the project relies on communication and transparency in a couple of ways. Communication is critical to ensure that everyone understands what is at stake and has a consistent understanding between stakeholders – no hidden agendas or specialized knowledge held in one area.

Transparency is required as the selection of which projects get committed resources needs to be understood throughout the organization, consistently applied and when decisions are made, they need to be explained. Often this is more difficult for the projects that are either rejected or put on hold – people often have some personal skin in the game for a particular project. I’ve found this to be particularly true if it’s perceived that a specific project is tied to an executive’s variable pay.

Annie MacLeod
I think project managers can benefit by having skills in meeting facilitation. It can be a great differentiator as well as utilized throughout a project lifecycle – with key stakeholders as well as project teams. That said, PMs can sometime outsource facilitation of key stakeholder meetings to a neutral professional facilitator (like myself) to ensure they are able to fully participate as well as neutral to all the stakeholders.

Annie MacLeod
There is often resistance to collaboration – particularly at this stage of a project. Unfortunately, in some organization’s collaboration is seen as something teams do not senior executives. In this case, you may need to work one-on-one with different stakeholders to ensure you gather all the information you need as well as understand where they are coming from. You can then collaborate on the decision, or if that’s not possible be clear on who’s role and who has the authority to make the decisions needed.

Due to organizational pressures and demands – each department and senior manager has specific goals and objectives while also having limited resources. Projects can demand extensive resource commitments and projects (due to their complexity) have interdepartmental implications. For example, almost every new project whether it’s about increasing sales, decreasing costs or implementing new productivity software will affect multiple departments and significantly impact the IT department. It’s critical that all the business departments – Sales, Marketing, Customer Fulfillment, Customer Support, Billing, etc. collaborate to ensure that the projects that best benefit the organization are selected in the initiation process.

This will require some deep conversations and the input of everyone to fully understand the benefits to be realized and the implications for their departmental resources. There will be differing opinions in these conversations which can be handled in a variety of ways with specific collaboration techniques. To ensure everyone can speak, each person can be given 2 minutes to express their support and concerns for a particular project. Then these can be categorized, summarized and voted on for each project being initiated. Also, having a parking lot area for information extraneous to the conversation can be helpful – allowing people to be heard but remain on topic.

Annie MacLeod
I suggest they get involved as soon as possible in the initiation of a project – even if it’s just as a viewer or observer to ensure they have as much information as possible from this key activity.

By being involved at the initiation stage a PM can gain insights into key stakeholders’ priorities, decision making and leadership style. Also, there will be insights into corporate priorities, informal organizational dynamics and corporate methods or expectations for executive presentations. These can be insightful during the downstream stakeholder activities of planning and project delivery reporting.