The Relationship to Planning Activities

Because many project managers have limited project initiation experience, and because many organizations have differing views on what project initiation entails, it is not always clear how project initiation relates to project planning. When you review the following list of common project management activities performed during the Initiating phase, you can understand why the line between these two major activities is not clear:

• Determining business need

• Collecting historical info

• Determining project objectives and goals

• Resolving conflicting high-level goals

• Developing product descriptions

• Determining deliverables

• Determining process outputs

• Documenting constraints

• Documenting assumptions

• Defining strategies

• Identifying performance criteria

• Determining resource requirements

• Defining budgets

• Producing formal documentation

• Finalizing and gaining approval of the project charter from stakeholders

In fact, there is considerable overlap in the sets of project management activities. The main point to remember is that many of the initiation activities are further refined during project planning, especially estimating, defining assumptions, and determining deliverables.

Generally, any planning activity performed during initiation is "high level" and on the order-of-magnitude scale. In other words, the estimates are often reflected on a power-of-10 scale (10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, and so on).