I consider the initiation phase to be critical for the success of a project. In order to highlight its importance, I created a presentation called "Project Initiation and Scoping - Simple ideas for successful project initiations”. With it I am trying to highlight what I believe are the most important elements for a successful start and the possible outcomes of not paying attention to this phase.

The main reason for creating this presentation and delivering it in my training sessions is the fact that I've encountered many project managers and business representatives who do not pay enough attention to it. They almost skip this stage and prefer to do planning as soon as possible and start working on projects. This seems to be happening especially when projects are part of global initiatives which implement the same product/service in many countries and business units. People tend to copy and paste the same information from one project to the next, without paying too much attention to the details specific to each project part of that initiative. Therefore they always end up delivering their projects later than scheduled, with less quality or higher costs.

Attached you can find the handouts for this presentation which include some additional notes.

Speaking of Initiation and Scoping, I would love to hear your thoughts about how you think it should be handled in order to successfully start a project.

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Basic Principles in Project Scheduling