Before Project Initiation . . .

I''m a consultant, so for me, I may or may not be part of the ''Proposal'' process. I developed the Project Management Methodology for my company and the input to the Project Initiation Phase is "Proposal" and I am working on defining those steps that take place before the PM initiates the project because truth be told, the relationship is already developed when the proposals are being negotiated. Great topic!

Hello Karen, Great input there. Sometimes the charter is handed down to the project manager to execute and other times he is part of the project selection process. Based on your experience, can this affect the way the project is delivered?

The question you made is a matter of business analysis. In fact, while the role exists for years, from 2015 the PMI has explicit recognized the role when creating the Practitioners Guide for Business Analysis (besides year before the PMI created the PBA certification). You can read what happends before initiation inside the practitioners guide. On the other side, other organizations has project management methods (not guides) where the pre-project activities are included like you can find in PRINCE2. When you work as business analyst the moment where you include the project manager depends on several factors (life cycle, culture, availability, etc). And it is important that you can include a person who knows about project management in order to help you but that not implies that that person will be the project manager assigned to the project when the business case is approved. If you ask me, while I can perform both roles, while I have both certfications, while I have performed both roles from years, if I have to work as business analyst I always try to include a project manager as soon as possible. And for me it is critical to have one to my side when I am creating the business case.

I think it depends on whether the project is internal or not. If external, then the proposal and contract would be the necessary input into project initiation. If the project is internal, I would expect the business strategy or tactic to be input.

Michael/Sergio:
Great posts! I have only a small "mental problem" with converging project management and business analysis (mainly as roles in a project, see my argumentation at http://www.projectmanagement.com/discussio...asc&pageNum=2).

Before the project starts, there are a lot of work from strategy (defining objectives/targets and initiatives/actions) or org. performance analysis (defining issues/problems or risks). This is a job of the "business", knowledge of basic project/program/portfolio mgmt skills is very important of course, but not in the critical path. The Portfolio/Demand manager should be involved. Available resources in budget for changes should be also considered in a high-level ...

Also after them, the "ideation" of change proposals (from business, IT ...) is necessary to be made by "business" (managers, SMEs) together with business architecture / analysis ... still it is not about planning the project, which is a full responsibility of the PMs... They has to create a Business Case, identify benefits etc ... While it is good to involve / inform PMs about that, it is not their CORE work (neither responsibility!) ... (let take pragmatically that in the mid-time, the PMs are working on their resp. projects, and are constrained by time, they have not a lot of time to fully participate on these works)

At this point, after this business exercise, should be very usefull to make the first ESTIMATIONS and first solution designs (at a very high architectonic level), maybe estimate rowly how many staff will be involved, identifying busines risks, the IT architect together with business architect/analyst and solution architect should define the basic solution (or solution scenarios ...) but still, a detailed PLANNING (I hugely differ estimation from planning) is not made. In some orgs it is made by architects/analysts WITH PM SKILLS... no necessary to spend / waste valuable PMs time... (but, a good practice is to present in some sessions the expected ideas to the PM staff, or at least to publish it internally to them ...)

For that, will be very useful, that the Archi / Analysis role/team, has very solid project mgmt skills, to make realistic ESTIMATIONS ...

Portfolio/Demand mgmt can request (often based also on mgmt request) a more detailed assessment of the idea/proposal (still not a project!) for prioritization purposes... The key is, to not get the estimations as final plan and as final numbers, so it can be more "agile" :-)

In some organizations, for some proposals, it passes also a review by the MOST EXPERIENCED PM or the PMs manager ... In some organizations the planning is realized before the mgmt prioritzation, in some organizations it is assigned to the future PM, which has actually other 1...5 projects active, but can track from the beginning the proposal, discuss, meet the business people ... it is only based on how many phases of estimating/planning are defined (2, 3 or 4).

The prioritization process is very often the point where is decided: "yes, spend time and effort on detailed planning" and here should officially start the PM his work...(reserving the right "resource" for the real/exact time period planning the final milestones, planning the real cash-flow...), his main goal is to DELIVER CHANGE. Of course he starts with understanding the business needs, the business case, the expected high-level solution archi, accepting all the conditions and attributes, and now, he starts a planning process (nevermind if by Prince, PMI or any other methodlogy), at this case, the ultimate responsibility for the business case is still on the "client", or "business" (of course it can be also IT the client...) and PM has very clear starting position.

I know that you can say: "in other orgs. it happens differently" and I agree, my point is, that before the project initiates, there is a huge work by mgmt, by "business", helped/facilitated by Enterprise/Business Archi/Analysis, PM can be informed, but he has not why to spend a lot of time doing what is not his core business. Everybody has to do what is his job and responsibility, and the PM is good killing any enemies when the game starts, sorry eliminating resistance :-) and delivering the managed change or product/output as requested, but not discussing about the benefits, the TCO, the architecture... (what with the proposals that not passed the prioritization process? time-waste for PMs, but for analysts/architects it is very useful and enrich their information about the org.)