Starting up a project I: people and lessons

Starting up a project has six activities in common PRINCE2 7 usage. This lesson covers the first three, which are about people and experience: appointing the executive and the project manager, capturing previous lessons, and designing and appointing the project management team. Lesson 4 covers the next two, which produce the outline business case and the project brief, and lesson 5 covers the last, planning the initiation stage. The activities are presented in order, but in practice they overlap and the project manager often works on several at once.

Appoint the executive and the project manager

The first activity establishes accountability. Someone in the business layer, often the person who issued the mandate, appoints the executive. The executive is the single person ultimately accountable for the project, owns the business case and chairs the project board. PRINCE2 insists on a single executive because shared accountability tends to become no accountability: when two directors jointly own a project, each can assume the other is watching the business case.

The executive then appoints the project manager. The project manager will do most of the work of starting up, but cannot do it without someone who can answer the questions only the business can answer: why are we doing this, what would make it worthwhile, and how much are we willing to spend to find out? This is why the executive is appointed first. A project manager appointed without an executive will either stall or start making business decisions that are not theirs to make.

Both appointments should be confirmed with role descriptions, tailored from the standard PRINCE2 role descriptions to fit the project. PRIN-120 and PRIN-130 described the roles; in starting up, what matters is that each person has agreed to the role, understands what it involves and has the time to do it. An executive who will be on leave for three of the next six months, or a project manager who is already running two other projects, is a risk that should be recorded now, not discovered at the first missed board meeting.

The daily log is usually created now. It is the project manager's diary of informal issues, actions and observations that do not yet need formal treatment. In PRINCE2 7 it forms part of the project log, alongside the lessons log, risk register, issue register, quality register and product register that later processes create. During starting up, the daily log is often where the project manager records early concerns, such as a stakeholder who seems opposed, until the risk register exists in initiation.

Capture previous lessons

The second activity puts the principle of learning from experience to work at the earliest possible moment. Before designing the team, choosing an approach or estimating anything, the project manager looks for lessons from previous projects, from other organizations, from corporate standards and from the experience of the people involved. The lessons go into a lessons log, which the project will keep adding to throughout its life.

Lessons are most useful when they are specific, when they say what happened and why, and when they suggest what to do differently. 'Communication was poor' is not a usable lesson. 'The previous meter replacement project informed customers by letter only, received over 400 complaints about unannounced installers, and recommended door hangers two days before each visit' is. During starting up the project manager is looking for lessons that affect the decisions about to be made: team structure, approach, estimates and the initiation stage plan.

PRINCE2 also expects the project to record lessons it learns itself, not just lessons it inherits. In starting up, the lessons log may already contain entries about the process of getting the project going, for example that the mandate took three months to arrive because nobody knew who owned the problem. Such entries are valuable for the organization even if they do not change this project.

Searching the lessons log

Ridgeline Water's project manager finds a lessons library from previous capital projects at the utility and a short report shared by a neighbouring utility that installed smart meters three years earlier. The code below searches the combined list for lessons relevant to the decisions in starting up, using simple tags, and shows which ones should influence the project brief and the initiation stage plan.

lessons = [
    ("L01", "Meter replacement 2019", "Letters alone led to 400+ complaints about unannounced installers", {"communication", "installation"}),
    ("L02", "Nearby utility AMI", "Radio coverage survey before contract avoided costly redesign", {"approach", "supplier", "estimating"}),
    ("L03", "Pipe renewal 2021", "Board met only quarterly; decisions waited up to 11 weeks", {"governance", "team"}),
    ("L04", "Nearby utility AMI", "Billing interface took twice the estimate; integrate early", {"estimating", "it", "approach"}),
    ("L05", "Office move 2022", "Catering supplier late", {"facilities"}),
    ("L06", "Customer portal 2020", "Accessibility testing left to the end caused a 6-week delay", {"quality", "it"}),
]
decisions = {
    "team design": {"governance", "team"},
    "project approach": {"approach", "supplier", "it"},
    "initiation estimates": {"estimating"},
    "communication": {"communication"},
}
for decision, tags in decisions.items():
    hits = [lid for lid, _, _, t in lessons if t & tags]
    print(f"{decision:21} -> {', '.join(hits) if hits else 'none found'}")
unused = [lid for lid, _, _, t in lessons if not any(t & tags for tags in decisions.values())]
print("Not relevant to starting up decisions:", ", ".join(unused))

team design           -> L03
project approach      -> L02, L04, L06
initiation estimates  -> L02, L04
communication         -> L01
Not relevant to starting up decisions: L05

Five of the six lessons bear on a starting up decision. The quarterly board lesson (L03) shapes team design: Ridgeline Water's board will meet monthly during delivery and be available for decisions by email between meetings. The coverage survey and billing interface lessons (L02 and L04) shape the project approach: a radio coverage survey and an early interface agreement with IT go into the initiation stage plan. The office move lesson is not relevant here, and recording that judgement is itself useful: the lessons log is a working tool, not an archive.

Design and appoint the project management team

The third activity designs the rest of the project management team: the senior users and senior suppliers who join the executive on the board, project assurance, any change authority, project support and, where they are already known, team managers. PRIN-130 covered the organizing practice in depth, including role combinations and the rules about which combinations are acceptable. In starting up, the project manager applies those rules to produce a structure, gets agreement from the executive, and confirms that each person has accepted their role.

Three questions dominate this activity. First, does the board represent all three interests: business, user and supplier? Second, is project assurance independent of the project manager? Third, does each person have the authority and the time to do their role? Starting up is also the moment to decide whether some roles are combined, which is common on smaller projects, and to record the reasons. Combining the executive and senior user can work for an internal project; combining project assurance with project support should be avoided because it removes independence.

One complication is common: the external supplier has not yet been selected. Ridgeline Water cannot appoint the meter supplier's delivery director until a contract exists. The project manager records this in the team structure as a role to be filled, notes the gap in the project brief, and ensures the IT manager can represent the supplier interest in the meantime. The commercial management approach prepared in initiation will explain how the external supplier joins the board once appointed.

In a Canadian municipality, appointing staff from different departments to the project board may need the agreement of each department head and, for unionized staff, attention to collective agreement provisions about duties and acting assignments. Starting up is the right time to secure those agreements.