Project Initiation: How to Start Your Project Correctly

Can we just discuss this?“, „I have something here that needs to be done by tomorrow though.“ – Heart on hands, who among you has heard these sentences before? Thought so. All of us are keen to approach, progress and expect the same from our colleagues, partners and superiors in our everyday professional life.

Here are some helpful tips and stimuli for workflows & briefings by Imke – Senior Marketing Communications Manager at Headstart Studios – with which you can both plan and initiate your upcoming projects well. You will learn why it is important to take time in project preparation, clearly define the set-up, see a proper briefing as a work simplification and that the „quick quick“ is not a solid and resilient approach. As a bonus, you will receive a blue print as a workflow and a briefing template at hand.

How to start a project? Planning to the plan

This can hurt a little now, but we'll quickly tear off the band-aid: every project requires a preparation time. And unfortunately, little can be changed about that. If you're already starting with a „but“, just wait, because we're going to explain to you why you need the phase of preliminary work. Before you initiate a project, you need a certain amount of time to define a timeline of the project, gather relevant information for the briefing, identify stakeholders, determine costs, coordinate appointments and, with all this important information, set up a workflow suitable for the project. Take a look at your briefing template again for control and systematically go through which information you need to collect. If you don't have a briefing template, you can download here.

If you have completed all these steps, then you are well prepared and can be a perfect point of contact for your superior, colleagues and service providers. Because, let's be honest: what does it look like when you are responsible for your project and can't answer organizational or in-depth content information? Right, so prepare better in the future. The golden rule is: planning to the plan.

How is a project initiated? The workflow determines how it works

Take a final strategy, a realistic timeline, important stakeholders, planned capacities and relevant information and plan a project. What sounds like a simple list is usually difficult to implement in working reality and requires good project management skills. Asana thanks, you can digitize the (un-)loved project directly and make it accessible to all participants. If Asana is not the tool of choice, then there are of course also strong alternatives to the Project Management Tool, such as

• Trello,
• Basecamp,
• Jira
• ...or the favorite of a huge TikTok community Notion.

Just search and test yourselves!

If you have all the tools at the start, it's time for the meat and potatoes, i.e. the workflow. This is the heart of your project, it's your roadmap how everything should go.

Workflows are not final, as the name suggests, they are flowing. In everyday work we would just like to have one, the best and the permanent solution for everything, but mostly this doesn't work. But that's not bad, there's a chance to find a project initiation and workflow that fits well for a while and with which employees and project participants can work efficiently by testing.

A typical workflow includes a preparation phase, a project start phase, a production phase and a phase afterwards, the preparation phase.

A typical workflow to initiate a project. The emphasis is on typical, because every workflow should definitely be adapted to the company as well as the project. Copyright: Imke Aileen de Kuijper

Off to the preparation phase. This includes the strategy, the briefing and the project set-up. With the start of the project, you need a clear strategy, on which the project is based. The strategy is the foundation. Without a foundation, no house. The (company, communication or marketing) strategy can already be defined or must be developed and finally approved before the project starts. This is important in order to set up and develop the project in accordance with the strategy.

Next, you need to set up the briefing. For this you need a basis to write a usable briefing. How to do this can be found out in the next section.

In the same step, the project set-up is defined: Which stakeholders, colleagues and experts do I need for my project? As soon as these are selected, it goes to the next phase and a Kick-Off Meeting takes place - digitally or in person. The kick-off meeting is the initial meeting of all important project participants. It marks the official start of work, in which all necessary information is given to everyone. The briefing is discussed, additional & background information, timing, budget, definition of ownership, open issue list and to-dos for all participants are clarified.

From here the project really starts and the development starts. In this area you work iteratively. Because from the development of ideas, testing, rejecting, fine tuning and the examination of technical implementations, it goes back and forth over a longer period of time. Here it is important to schedule enough time, nerves and capacities!

Tip:As project leader, you should always be informed about where the participants are in the process and advise them, so that you are always informed about everything and can report to your superior at any time about the status of the project. This is your project management shining hour!

When you have an idea, a product or a concept at the end of the development that all stakeholders find so good that it is finished, it goes to the next phase of the workflow - the production. This is where it gets exciting, as additional partners and service providers may join in, increasing the complexity of the tasks. Regardless whether a website is being built, a physical product created, a banner package programmed or an online film shot, you as project managers should always be informed about everything and know where you are in the implementation. Where do potential stumbling blocks need to be skillfully circumvented, when do you need to speak to the stakeholders about possible timing delays - all this is in your responsibility in this phase.

The length of production always depends on the product to be created, but in the end there is testing or quality control. Here the product needs to be tested thoroughly and potential errors identified or opportunities for optimization tapped.

Once you're satisfied with your product, it says „Hello World“ - the launch or Go Live. Now the work is presented to the world hoping that all potential weaknesses have been found before a customer or user makes them aware of it. Of course, the optimization can continue even after the live event, because let's be honest: we are never really finished and satisfied, are we?

But to really know if everything went as you had hoped, you should do a maneuver critique (internally as well as externally). This is a meeting in which all stakeholders can clearly and openly offer constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement:

• What went well?
• What went wrong?
• What should we pay attention to in the next (similar) project and not make the same mistakes?
• What was particularly good and can possibly be saved as standard?

These questions are just a few first approaches that can be discussed in the internal maneuver critique.

Tip:It is recommended to take a „win or learn“ attitude in the maneuver critique. What went well is recorded as a 'win'. Under 'learn' fall the points that did not go well. Why? Because you learn best from mistakes!

For the external maneuver critique, for example, customer reviews on portals can also be viewed. The same applies if you engage with the service providers used - was the briefing and communication during the production phase good? What can we do even better or where is there room for us to grow?

As the end of our project workflow, you as project managers should make the preparation on the server, i.e. the project is saved in its entirety on your servers, so that the entire project including its workflow from start to end is understandable for non-project participants in the future.

Why? How? What? With these tips you build a good briefing

Briefing is not the same as briefing. This may now be shocking, but it is the reality of our working world. There are myths surrounding whether the ideal briefing even exists. So it was rarely seen by many in their professional careers, apart from the ideal type, however, the wildest „briefings“ in the truest sense of the word. One-liners as an e-mail, 10-page PDFs with running texts and accompanied by an e-mail without context or also Post-its. And 90% of the worked out briefings may not be perfect, but as a Post-it it is a no-go.

As you already read in the first part, it requires a clean preparation for a project. And many projects start with a briefing. The better, more structured and with the right depth of content the briefing is, the easier it is for all project participants to do their tasks. A briefing is always also a kind of cheat sheet for the stakeholders, as it clearly defines who has what to do when in the project.

Anyone who can empathize well with people and understands the questions people ask can also write briefs. That's not rocket science. People have questions. People want to understand. People want to be involved. If you keep these points in mind and collect all necessary information in advance to inform the people involved, then you have all the ingredients for a briefing.

Always try to put yourself in the shoes of your counterpart and weigh up which information you have from the project is relevant for your counterpart for his task. Not everyone needs to know everything. You as project managers are the knowledge center and you decide who needs to know what in order to successfully accomplish his task.

Assign clear areas of tasks and tasks to the project participants so that everyone knows what he or she has to do and there are no conflicts. The worst thing is when one person thinks the other one is doing it and in the end nobody is doing it.

Whether you keep your briefing in a project tool, fill out a form or sketch the information in a PowerPoint presentation, it's up to you. You can use this template and try if it works for you.

The structure was rethought and rearranged from why, over how, to what, after inspiration to the Golden Circle Model by Simon Sinek (2009). If you want to know more about the infamous Gold Circle Model, you can watch it as a video - one of the most successful TED Talks!

According to Sinek, the why is central because it's essential for human action to know exactly why you're doing something. If the why is crucial for the acceptance of a planned project, then it can also be crucial for the structure of a briefing. That was the idea behind the reordering. Only when you have clarified the context and the backgrounds - i.e. fully understand why a project should be initiated - can you continue with the how and finally with the what.

In these three parts you should clarify the following if you want to create a suitable briefing to your project:

1. Part: All questions around the Why

This point includes important elements that clarify the context. It's about information like:

• backgrounds
• Goal(s)
• Company values/culture/history
• Brand/Product/Project
• Core message
• Brand position

2. Part: After the 'Bigger Picture', comes the How

Or more precisely, how is the project achieved. In this section belong info, like:

• Target group
• Task
• Language
• Sources
• Important that needs to be considered

3. Part: Last but not least the organizational or also the What

In many briefings these hard facts are gladly mentioned first, but in principle these are only accessories, after the backgrounds and tasks were clarified. This last section is about:

• Technical specifications
• Textual specifications
• Timings incl. Deadlines
• Important files (e.g. NDAs, (design) guidelines etc.)
• Attachments (e.g. screenshots, wireframes, links to Miro boards etc.)
• Processing time (total)
• Dates (e.g. meetings, conferences, Go Live etc.)
• Budget
• Planned capacities
• Involved stakeholders
• Responsible person (incl. e-mail address)
• Author
• Date
• Version
• Link to the server

Keep in mind, you don't have to use the template 1:1, you can do it. Look at what works for you and if necessary, take out the most important. The last point can be said in addition, that it can also be critical info in the organizational info - especially for timings, budget and capacities - but it is never the core of a project and thus a briefing, but context information for the "why we want to implement this project?".

Conclusion: A good project initiation is the consequence of many not so good project initiations

You have now received a lot of input and know how briefings and workflows can help you with project initiation. And let's be honest, some of it will work well for you and your projects, others will not. Just as there are many ways to Rome, there are many ways to start projects and successfully bring them to their goal.

However, courage to try out new processes and methods and to make mistakes is indispensable in project management. And, responsibility in good times as well as in bad times of the project. If you are project managers, then you lead the way, give the timing, the way and the plan. You worked out this plan carefully and defined it in detail.

If you now want to throw yourselves excitedly into your next project, then let it be said at the end that it always pays off to try something new - also in project initiation and even if the working time is strongly clocked. There is room for improvement in everything we do every day and we all learn something new every day.

„Do you want to improve yourself?“ - an important question in terms of projects and their planning. If the answer is „Yes“, then good project planning is a start. Source: Adam Grant, @adamgrant