June 23, 2023

Don’t skip the start 

When a new project lands on your desk, your first question is probably something like, “when’s it due?” And often, the answer is something like “yesterday”, “ASAP”, or the dreaded, “management says it’s a priority”.

When a project’s under a tight deadline, you’re immediately under pressure to produce results, and it can be tempting to skip the starting phases so you can get right into the execution. After all, that’s what leadership is really looking for, right?

Unfortunately, skipping the initiation and planning phases can lead to problems later in the project. These are the phases when the project manager defines the scope of the project itself, identifying stakeholders, writing a project charter, determining success criteria, and more. Without these critical definitions, it’s impossible to determine what elements need to be considered in the rest of the project plan. More importantly, we need this information to determine what milestones we need to hit in order for our project to be considered to be complete.

It’s critical for a project manager to know the scope of a project – its constraints, variables, and expected outcomes – in order to accurately plan for its execution, or build phase. These factors can’t be ignored forever, and if they pop up during the build can derail or make irrelevant all the work that’s been completed. For example, if a programmer building a database to store employee records is planning on a unique employee ID number to tie everything together, it would slow production down considerably to learn that no such number exists in the current records. However, if this is known beforehand, the project can take this into account and find a solution to fit the problem.

Successful project managers know the value of the initiation phase. For his 2006 book Alpha Project Managers : What the Top 2% Know That Everyone Else Does Not, Andy Crowe surveyed hundreds of project managers and found that while all of them agreed that pre-execution project planning was critical to project success, the most successful of them – the “alpha” project managers who delivered more projects successfully and on time – spent twice as many hours on the initiating and planning phases. 

Making the time for initiation and planning is clearly a valuable strategy for a project’s future success. By doing so, we’re managing expectations, identifying potential roadblocks, reducing scope creep, and setting the project up for a successful and timely conclusion.