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How to Start Your Project?

October 13, 2009 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Project Lifecycle Phases, Project Management for Beginners

How to Start Your Project?
By Frederic Delrieu

You have been assigned, you have a team, a budget, a schedule and you are impatient to get a first result to write in your weekly report… but how should you start?

First ask yourself the right questions, and find answers from the whole team to generate motivation and dynamics. Is the project well defined in terms of:

  • Results expected by the customer (quality, performance)?

  • Results expected by the company (capitalization of know-how, development of a standard, potential future developments of new similar projects …)?

  • Profitability (breakdown of all the expenses and income on the whole life cycle of the project, calculation of profitability indicators, risks on raw material and currency rates…)?

  • Schedule (milestones, including in serial life and aftersales)?

  • Risks of cancellation (for what reasons the company could give up the project?)

  • Resources providing, especially human resources (Who are the contributors? For each of them, what is their involvement level on the project?)

  • External partners associated to the project (Which suppliers, partners, customers? who are the “experts” and project contributors of each partner company? What are schedule and budget? responsibility-sharing, job-sharing and budget-sharing?)

  • Objectivation of decision elements (refer to next post, “Value assessment to decide”)?

  • Organization (standard week schedule, weekly meetings, experts decisions committee, processes and rules to be applied…)

This phase is essential to define all the details that could lead to a project cancellation and that you’ll have to keep under monitoring… at the risk to be sent back home before the end of the project!

All missing information must be obtained from the company managers at the beginning, in order not to look for it during the project as you’ll have better to do! Therefore let’s anticipate! Murphy’s law applied to the missing information is clear “You are certainly going to need each single missing information before the end of the project”…

As soon you have all this information, you’ll have to formalize them in a kick-off file and make sure all the project contributors share this information. Then you can schedule you kick-off meeting and start the game!

Frederic Delrieu has more than 10 years of experience in Automotive R&D. He’s an expert in Engineering Project Management, from the idea to the industrial application : Product road-map, product design, Systems Engineering, functional specification, supplier sourcing, development and implementation, quality assurance. Frederic’s can be contacted through his blog, or through his linkedin profile.

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