4 to 5 hours
This part is about discovering the project initiation activities and initiating the sample project.
Common pitfalls
This topic has the tendency to become too long and to go into too much detail about planning. In this view, make sure you keep the length and amount of detail to an appropriate level and remember the following:
- Planning is only part of project management and even the best plans are ineffective when not enough attention is paid to the other project management activities.
- Insisting on a perfect plan discourages your audience from using a structured project management system. Your goal is to help them understand how to create a good enough plan, not a perfect one. They will always have the chance to improve their planning skills in the future, after they’ve implemented a simple, structured project management system and started benefiting from it.
Activity discovery
Start with a discovery exercise to create the list of project initiation activities, without going into too much detail about those activities.
Exercises
Now we can run the activities for our sample project:
- A01 - Appoint the sponsor (exercise)
- A02 - Appoint the project manager (exercise)
- A03 - Appoint the key team members (exercise)
- A04 - Describe the project (exercise)
- A05 - Identify and plan the deliverables (exercise)
- A06 - Identify risks and plan responses (exercise)
- A07 - Have the project initiation peer-reviewed (exercise)
- A08 - Make a go/no-go decision (exercise)
- A09 - Kick off the project (exercise)
- A10 - Conduct a focused communication (exercise)
Conclusion
Give them a quick overview of what has been done in Part 2 and remind them, once again, of the purpose of this activity group.