10.2 Starting up a Project and Its Agile Workshops

10.2 Starting up a Project and Its Agile Workshops

Quick summary: SU is a pre-project process answering one question: do we have a viable and worthwhile project? It is deliberately light. Its agile workshops include the project canvas workshop, in which user groups are defined and prioritized, and the starting up workshop.

Purpose and objectives

The purpose of starting up a project is to ensure the prerequisites for initiating a project are in place. The board should be able to answer: is this a viable and worthwhile project, and do we know enough to authorize spending money on initiating it?

SU exists to solve a specific organizational pathology: projects that begin because someone senior wants visible action, before anyone has asked what the product is, who wants it, or whether it can be built. Its objectives are to establish:

• That there is a business justification for initiating the project
• That the necessary authorities exist to initiate it
• That sufficient information is available to define the project's scope
• The likely options for delivering the product, and the chosen approach
• The project management team — the people, appointed and available
• The plan for the initiation stage — the work needed to lay the foundations

Activities

• Appoint the executive and the project manager. Nothing else can proceed without accountability.
• Capture previous lessons. The learn from experience principle applied at the earliest possible point: what did comparable projects teach us?
• Design and appoint the project management team. Including the agile roles the project will use.
• Prepare the outline business case. In PRINCE2 Agile this takes the form of the project canvas.
• Select the project approach and assemble the project brief. Including whether and how agile will be used.
• Plan the initiation stage.

Agile tailoring

Keep it light. SU is the process most damaged by over-documentation. The output is a decision to initiate or not, and it should be reachable in days rather than weeks.

Requirements are captured coarsely. High-level requirements are expressed as epic user stories rather than a detailed specification. Nobody knows enough yet for detail, and detail written now will be invalidated later.

Collaboration replaces circulation. Rather than the project manager drafting a brief and sending it round for comment, SU is run through workshops that get the stakeholders into a room to produce the artifacts together. This is faster and produces genuine shared understanding rather than nominal sign-off.

Assessing agile suitability. SU is where the project first considers whether an agile approach fits — the kind of assessment the Agilometer supports, surfacing agile adoption risks early enough to plan a response.

The project canvas workshop

The project canvas workshop produces the project canvas: the single-page artifact capturing the project's purpose, its users, the outcomes and benefits sought, the constraints and the high-level approach.

Its most examinable feature: user groups are defined and prioritized in the project canvas workshop. This is where personas do their work — turning "the users" into specific, understood groups with an agreed order of importance. Everything downstream depends on it: backlog ordering, release sequencing, and who is consulted about what.

In PRINCE2 Agile the project canvas is more than a summary. It carries the business case — the outline version here, elaborated into the detailed version during initiation. That is why the canvas is a governance artifact rather than a facilitation prop.

The starting up workshop

The starting up workshop builds the early shared understanding SU needs: what problem the project addresses, what the product might be, who is involved, what the options are, and what the initiation stage must do. It is the collaborative vehicle for assembling the project brief and agreeing the project approach.

What is produced

The release map point is worth noting: it is created here, early and coarse, so the board can see the intended shape of delivery before authorizing initiation. It is then refined and updated as plans are documented in later processes.

The exit

SU ends when the project board, in directing a project, authorizes initiation — or declines to. Declining is a legitimate and valuable outcome: SU has done its job if it has stopped an unjustified project before it consumed a budget.