At this stage your project is approved and you have decided how to manage the project or at least you have an outline approach and hopefully you have a collaborative site setup. Now it is time to earn your stripes and plan and setup your project. For the purpose of this short guide we break this step into the following sub-steps:

• (i) Plan the Project
• (ii) Desk Check the Project Plan
• (iii) Notify the Team of their Responsibilities

(i) Plan the Project

The thinking in this guide is that you will need a Project Statement and a Task List (of some sort) on most projects, hence the first two sub-steps here. Thereafter what artifacts you use to manage the project varies considerably from project to project. What artifacts you will use should have been decided in Initiation Stage of the project of course (unless you skipped that step!).

(a) Complete a Project Statement

• The Project Statement is also known as the Project Profile / Project Charter / Project Definition. This is the master project document and communicates to one and all what the intention of the project is. This document contains the high level information about the project. Some of the information in the document (e.g. status, scheduled finish date, etc.) gets updated through the course of the project. In many cases some of the information in this document is used to collate project status reports as the project progresses.

(b) Define and Allocate the Tasks

• Decide on the Tasks needed to complete the project successfully or at least the tasks you know about at this stage. You might elect to use a simple task list or maybe a Microsoft Project like WBS (work breakdown structure) that has parent and sub-tasks and dependencies between tasks (i.e. one task can not start until the next task finishes). At this stage you may also elect to use Microsoft Project to draw up the task list and assignments.

(c) Add the Other Project Artifacts Needed

• At this point you are creating these artifacts for your project or if you are lucky enough to have local guidance you are updating them from given templates and if you are really lucky you are updating them using templates given in your collaborative site. Candidates artifacts will include: goals, documents, issues, risks, etc. In essence these are the project management sub-processes for your project.

(d) Assignment

• If your project is simple and your group is small and you just know who is free and not free then as you create the tasks and the artifacts you will assign these out to your project team members.
• In certain cases when you have a more formal definition of roles in use at your group then you will first assign a role to a task or an artifacts and at this stage you will need to assign a person to this role. This can be a quick way to setup a project where a project site comes with a list of tasks and artifacts that have roles pre-assigned. In this case all you need to do is assign the person to the role.
• In other cases where the organization is very large and people are committed to many projects you will not know who is free. In this scenario you will need to draft your plan to see who you need when. Then you will need to check on the resource availability before you make the assignment. In certain organizations you will even need to formally request the resources you nee at this stage.

(ii) Desk Check the Project Plan

At this stage your project should be well planned but it is no harm to have a step in your approach where you stand back and review it thoroughly. Now that you have created lots of tasks and artifacts you should for example look at the entire project in a Gantt (time sequenced) chart. You might also want to check the resource loading and find and fix any over allocations due to the new work assignments. Typically once you stand back and check your project you will find adjustments that it makes sense to make before you let the plan go live.

(iii) Notify the Team of their Responsibilities

It is all very well to plan a project in detail but needless to say you now need to let the team members know the plan for success. The more high quality communication on your project the better. Project team members are very smart and capable - so empower them by letting them know what is going on. Some mechanisms to do this include:

• Host a Project Kick-Off Meeting
• Enable your collaborative site with the facility to email notification on all new work assignments
• On your collaborative site setup an easy to find “My Work” reports / dashboards
• Setup scheduled emails with nudges for upcoming or late work. For example on a Monday morning early have an email of the work due this week and then on a Thursday morning have another email with work still open and due this week.