Project Inception Phase

Part of the project brainstorming, the inception phase is one of the most important moment to drive your idea. This would ideally be the end of your idea workflow and shall result on the transformation of one of several ideas in a project.

Previously and as result of Idea Management, one idea or a group of ideas, was selected. This will be the basis for any further investigation to create a formal project. Here are the main objectives of the inception phase:

• Describe the initiate requirements: this will the basis for building your project and define the first scope
• Identify main stakeholders: people, organization and systems that will interact with your system
• Estimate Risk: idea risk needs to be estimated. How risky is it to develop idea and invest money in it?

By meeting these objectives, you will implement processes to avoid:

• Wrong scope: scope hard to define due to project size or undefined high level requirements
• Wrong solution: a "too fast chosen" solution which does not meet all business requirements or can not be extended
• Wrong stakeholders: too many stakeholders with complex relationships
• Wrong Business needs: stakeholders may have competing business needs and this may difficult to deal with
• Underestimated risk

In order to complete the Project Inception Phase, the 2 following steps need to be covered:

• Initiate failure workflow: think about possible parallel path if failure happens during project implementation
• Initiate Project Life Cycle: as the idea has been selected, the project needs to be started.

The next project phase to realize is the Analysis which will be described in a separate article.