Project Initiation Checklist: The Perfect Way To Start Your Projects
Getting your project off on the right foot is a critical factor that helps determine its success. As you start your project, you need to take the initiative on the preparatory work, from preparing the scope, estimating the costs, assigning resources, and creating a project timeline, to getting sign-off on the key performance indicators.
Without a framework for project initiation, it’s easy to get lost in all the tasks that you need to finish before the project can start. This guide will walk you through the process of creating a project initiation checklist that sets the tone for the success of your project.
Why You Should Create a Project Initiation Checklist
Whether you use the waterfall methodology or Agile principles, your project has to start somewhere. Creating a project initiation checklist will lay the foundation for a successful project in the following ways:
- The project’s initiation phase is where the project stakeholders and project manager establish the direction and resource requirements and document them in a project charter. The project manager can use the charter to keep project team members and stakeholders on the same page as the project progresses.
- Clear project documents reduce the chances of miscommunication and keep the project from getting derailed, either because of out-of-scope tasks or because the output doesn’t meet expectations. This helps the project manager ensure that time and resources are used properly.
- Setting project objectives at the initiation phase helps to minimize costs while maximizing the benefits of the project. This allows you to deliver real value to your customer.
Preparing the documents carefully will also help your organization decide whether to fund your project and determine how it will be beneficial to them.
Three Things to Consider When Setting Up Your Project
Before you initiate or accept a project, you will need to consider three main factors. These things will dictate the way you initiate and manage your project from idea to conclusion.
Your Capacity
A project stands on three legs: time, quality, and cost. Knowing where you are in terms of these factors will allow you to determine whether you have enough capacity to manage a new project and what its scope should be.
For example, setting a project timeline for team members and stakeholders will give them an idea of what they are supposed to be doing at any given point. Estimating the project’s total cost will allow stakeholders and management to know how much they’re expected to spend, and whether this spending will affect other projects or operations.
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Your Team
Your project team will consist of everyone who has a role to play in the project. Defining the team composition will involve listing the tasks, identifying the resources or skills needed to do each task, then comparing it to what your project team already has.
Knowing the project team will allow you to negotiate with other teams for access to resources. It will also help you justify the cost of hiring a dedicated person or team specifically for this project if needed.
The Stakeholders
Your project stakeholders consist of everyone outside the project team who will be affected by the success or failure of the project. They may be senior executives in your organization, external customers, employees, and even the government or the general public.
Listing your stakeholders will help you craft a communication strategy that will allow you to identify, set, and manage their expectations. This list can also help you identify specific stakeholders who can be leveraged to improve the probability of your project succeeding.
For example, a stakeholder’s knowledge of data privacy regulations might help you identify what sort of data your team will be working with and how it should be managed for safety and efficiency.
Your Project Initiation Checklist
Now that we’ve identified the three key factors to consider as you create your checklist, it’s time to look at the things that you should do during the project initiation phase. Here is your project initiation checklist:
Define Your Goals
Without a clear, well-defined set of goals, your project can either fizzle out at the beginning or keep growing bigger and bigger until it becomes unmanageable. Setting your goals at the project initiation phase gives you something to aim for, whether the goal is creating a physical product or improving employee morale.
Goal-setting also involves setting the scope of the project. The project scope defines what stakeholders can expect your project team to accomplish, and what they cannot expect from your team. For example, a website redesign project might include both front-end and back-end development, and exclude doing SEO on the existing content.
Identify Risks & Obstacles
Murphy’s Law states that if something can go wrong, it will go wrong. Risk management involves identifying the factors that pose a risk to your project’s success and the steps you can take to eliminate or mitigate the effects of these risks. In some instances, you might decide to accept the risk if it won’t have much impact on your project team and your stakeholders.
You could do a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis at this point, focusing on the weaknesses of your project team and the threats your project faces. Weaknesses might include factors such as the lack of technical knowledge in your organization, while threats include competing products or other constraints from outside your team that could contribute toward the failure of the project.
Create a List of Tasks
Successful projects are broken down into smaller, more manageable tasks. A good project management plan lists these tasks, describes them briefly, and states how long each task will take and which tasks are dependent on its completion. For example, if you’re building a house, you will have to pour concrete for the foundation first (2–3 days), let it cure (1 week), then start building the walls (10 days).
A comprehensive task list will help you identify which tasks are going to be prioritized on any given day and will prevent confusion about the schedule. We recommend going beyond just listing the tasks. Visual tools like Gantt charts and PERT-CPM diagrams will help you and your project team understand task duration and dependencies easily.
Select the Appropriate Tools
The tools your project team will use depends largely on the tasks that they will perform. For software projects, your tools will include a coding environment and a testing toolkit, while for creative projects, you will need tools such as a video editor, an image and layout editor such as Blender, and audio manipulation software.
Aside from deploying project-specific tools, your team will also need tools that will help them work more closely together, especially now that most people are working remotely.
Collaboration tools like ProofHub will help them track each others’ task progress, while an employee time clock app will allow them to clock their billable hours, ensure they’re spending just the right amount of time on their tasks, and manage their time if they’re working on multiple projects.
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Assign Responsibilities
Your task list will form the backbone of your task assignments. You’ll need to assign tasks to people according to the skills needed to complete them. You won’t assign a video editing task to a C++ programmer, and you can’t expect a full-stack developer to do keyword research for a blog.
Aside from assigning responsibilities to individuals within your team, you will also need the appropriate people to sign off on each task and certify its completion. There will also be other people that the person responsible for the task will consult, and others who just need to be informed about the task status. Creating a RACI (responsible, approver, consultant, informant) matrix will help you identify the roles each individual will play for each task.
Set Key Performance Indicators
Source: Wikimedia
Remember when we did goal-setting in the first part of the project initiation checklist? We will need a way to track how your project is performing and how much ground is left to cover to reach your goals. In other words, you will need to measure your project’s success.
Setting key performance indicators (KPIs) will give you something tangible to measure as you work through the project. KPIs break down your main goals into bite-sized pieces, which makes it easier to change your approach to individual tasks as needed.
Let’s say you’re leading a project to help drive traffic to your website. Good KPIs include the number of people visiting the site and how long they stay on your site. You may also measure other metrics such as your site’s search ranking for specific keywords or even the number of domains that link back to yours. Whatever your KPIs, make sure they align with your overall project goal.
Monitor Project Performance & Deliverables
The tools we’ve listed above (Gantt charts, collaboration tools, RACI matrices, KPIs) all serve one common purpose: to help you monitor your project team’s performance and ensure they complete their deliverables on time.
Project monitoring is one of the most important things you’ll ever do as a project manager. You will need to constantly watch out for tasks that aren’t on a schedule and do some intervention to help your team deliver. You will also need to check on the status of deliverables to ensure that they comply with client specifications. Otherwise, your team might be forced to repeat the task and run the risk of not finishing the project on time.
Adapt & Improve Your Process
Constant project performance monitoring and measurement give you a large amount of data that you can use to further improve your process and make your team more efficient. If a specific task takes too much time to finish, for instance, you will need to ask the person or group responsible for it about the reasons for the delay. This will help you keep things on schedule next time.
Scheduling regular catch-up meetings with individual team members or daily whole team stand-up meetings will allow you to identify factors that get in the way of project success and encourage team members to be more accountable for the tasks assigned to them. A good project team is not afraid to adapt their approach to a project and is always trying to find ways to improve their performance.
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Wrapping Up
When you manage a project, you don’t want to leave anything to chance. There are so many factors, both internal and external, that influence project success. The initiation phase of the project is crucial to ensuring that it goes as smoothly as possible.
Creating a project initiation checklist helps you prepare thoroughly for the rest of the project. It should cover your goals and how you define project success, the risks and obstacles your project faces, the individual tasks and the tools and people assigned to them, and the mechanisms for tracking project performance and improving processes.
A project initiation checklist takes a bit of work, but it’s worth the effort when you look at the time and money you save as you go through your project. Is there anything you’d like to add to your checklist? Let us know below!
About the Author:
Owen Jones is the Senior Content Marketer at ZoomShift, an online schedule maker app. He is an experienced SaaS marketer, specializing in content marketing, CRO, and FB advertising.
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