10.4 Initiating a Project and Its Agile Workshops

10.4 Initiating a Project and Its Agile Workshops

Quick summary: IP exists to establish solid foundations for the project. It runs during the initiation stage, after the board has authorized initiation. Its two agile workshops are the project initiation workshop and the project kickoff workshop.

Purpose

The purpose of initiating a project is to establish solid foundations for the project, enabling the organization to understand the work needed to deliver the products before committing to significant spend.

Solid foundations is the phrase that identifies IP in a purpose question.

The seven activities

These need not run sequentially. They overlap and are revisited — deciding the tailoring changes the controls, and creating the plan changes the business case.

The project canvas becomes the detailed business case

In PRINCE2 Agile the project canvas carries the business case. The outline canvas created in SU is developed here into the detailed version, incorporating what planning has revealed: the release map, the benefit forecast per release, the confirmed user group priorities and the tailoring decisions.

Presenting the detailed canvas and release map to the board, and formally requesting authorization to deliver, is a separate step from the workshops themselves.

The project initiation workshop

The project initiation workshop aligns the people who will deliver the project on the same picture. It:

• Establishes shared understanding of the vision, objectives and goals
• Develops the detailed project canvas, drawing on lessons gathered in SU
• Works through the management approaches and controls collaboratively rather than by circulating drafts
• Surfaces disagreement early, while it is cheap to resolve

The project manager prepares by reviewing the daily log and lessons log and assembling the project documentation so the workshop starts from evidence rather than from a blank page.

The project kickoff workshop

Where the initiation workshop aligns the project, the project kickoff workshop forms the team. It establishes:

• Team introduction — the element that fosters familiarity and establishes connections, and the foundation of the psychological safety the team will need
• Team values and norms — the working agreements governing how the team operates
• Decision-making arrangements — often a team decision matrix, frequently arrived at through delegation poker
• The team dashboard — how the team will make its work visible

Getting these agreed before delivery starts is what separates a group of individuals assigned to a project from a team.

Agile tailoring of IP

Right-size the documentation. The PID is assembled, but its components can be short and can point to living artifacts. A management approach that fits on a page and is followed beats one that runs to twenty pages and is not read.

Record the tailoring decisions explicitly. Which agile approach the teams will use, how tolerances are set, what the Definition of Done contains, how progress will be reported, what the change authority may approve. Recording these is what makes tailoring deliberate rather than drift.

Agree the Definition of Done with governance. Because quality is a target held firm, the board needs to know what the guarantee actually is. This is a governance artifact as much as a team one.

Plan in layers. IP produces the project plan and the release map, not a detailed schedule of every iteration. Detail is added progressively.

Set up the controls that make agile governable. Dashboards rather than reports, a change budget so that ordinary change does not become an exception, and a delegated change authority so decisions do not queue.

What is produced