7 Essential Questions to Ask During Initiative Planning

Lonnie Pacelli is an Accenture/Microsoft veteran with four decades of learnings under his belt. He frequently writes and speaks on leadership, project management, work/life balance, and disability inclusion. Reach him at [email protected] and see more at ProjectManagementAdvisor.com.

 

In this series, I am outlining 42 questions that a product manager should ensure are answered across the following SDLC phases:

• Product Strategy – The reason a product exists, and its intended goals.
• Product Roadmapping – The broad timeline in which future product capabilities are slated for release.
• Initiative Planning – The definition of a project to deliver capabilities within a budget and schedule timeline.
• Solution Design – The people, process, systems and policy designs required to deliver the required capabilities.
• Solution Development – The people, process, systems, and policy capabilities have been developed and are ready for testing, training, and deployment planning.
• Solution Readiness – All solution aspects are accepted and ready to be deployed.

In the prior article, I focused on seven product manager’s accountabilities when developing a product roadmap. This article focuses on seven questions to be asked when defining an initiative:

1. Is there a sufficiently detailed charter in place that would support affected stakeholders completing their initiative planning? Even if your organization doesn't already have a standard initiative template, there are plenty of templates available on the internet. Given so, I'm not going to get too deep in what should be in an initiative charter.

It is …

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