11.2 Starting Up a Project

Trigger and purpose

Starting Up a Project (SU) is triggered by the Project Mandate, an input that usually arrives from corporate management or a programme. The mandate is often thin — a sentence in a strategy document, a customer request, a regulatory deadline — and one of SU's jobs is to flesh it out into something the board can act on.

The process has two core purposes. First, check that the project is worthwhile before the organisation spends the much larger effort of Initiating a Project. PRINCE2 treats initiation as an investment, and SU is the screening step that stops bad ideas early. Second, appoint the Project Board and Project Manager so that accountability exists before any delivery decisions are made. A project with no designated Executive is a project with nobody to authorise it.

A critical exam point: Starting Up does NOT authorise the project. It produces a request to initiate. The actual authorisation — the decision to spend money on initiation and to commit to the project — is made by the Project Board in the Directing a Project process, in the activity authorise initiation. Many scenario questions hinge on this distinction.

Activities and outputs

The Project Brief is the headline output. It is a composite management product containing:

• Outline Business Case — enough to judge whether the project is worth pursuing.
• Project Product Description — the project's output, its quality criteria, and acceptance method.
• Project approach — how the work will be delivered (the way, not the plan).
• Project management team structure — who fills which role.
• Initiation Stage Plan — the plan for the initiation stage itself, because initiation is itself a stage that must be authorised and controlled.

The request to initiate is then handed to the Project Board, which decides whether to authorise Initiating a Project.

Common exam scenarios

• "A new project has been suggested by a programme. What triggers Starting Up a Project?" — the Project Mandate.
• "Which document assembles the outline Business Case, Project Product Description, and project approach?" — the Project Brief.
• "Who is appointed during Starting Up?" — the Executive first, then the Project Manager, then the rest of the project management team.
• "Is the project authorised in Starting Up?" — No. SU produces a request to initiate; the board authorises initiation in Directing a Project.
• "Does Starting Up create a full Project Plan?" — No. It creates an Initiation Stage Plan only; the full Project Plan is built in Initiating a Project.

Tailoring notes

SU is intentionally lightweight. For a very small project, the Project Brief may be a one-page document; for a major programme-aligned project, it may be a substantial folder. The v7 guidance is explicit that SU should be proportionate — enough to make the go/no-go decision, not enough to pre-empt initiation. If the PM finds themselves building a detailed Project Plan during SU, they have over-run the process boundary.

Worked example: from thin mandate to decision-ready Brief

A programme issues a mandate: "Deliver an online assessment platform for the new professional certification." The PM designate, appointed by the Executive, first captures lessons from a prior e-learning project that overran because vendor selection was rushed; those lessons will later feed the Risk and Quality approaches built in Initiating. The Executive drafts an outline Business Case showing €450k cost against €1.2m of avoided manual-marking spend over three years, and the PM drafts the Project Product Description naming the platform, its pass/fail analytics, and 99.5% uptime as quality criteria. The PM selects a hybrid delivery approach — agile sprints for the candidate-facing portal, waterfall for the item-bank migration — and assembles the Project Brief by consolidating these pieces plus the team structure and the Initiation Stage Plan (a four-week, €40k initiation). The board reads the Brief, judges the outline case credible, and authorises initiation — not the project. Only after Initiating produces the PID will the board decide whether to commit to delivery. This sequencing is what stops a weak outline case from consuming a full initiation budget.

Common misconceptions

Authorisation boundary — a closer look

The single most tested point in SU questions is the authorisation boundary. Starting Up produces a request to initiate, which is a recommendation, not a decision. The Project Board, in the authorise initiation activity of Directing a Project, is the body that decides whether the outline Business Case justifies the cost of a full initiation. If the board declines, the project stops before initiation is funded. If the board accepts, Initiating a Project begins. Remember the sequence: mandate → SU → request to initiate → board decision (authorise initiation) → Initiating → PID → board decision (authorise project and first stage). Two board decisions, two different questions, two different processes producing the input for each.