Project initiation

Hi. My name is Alan Zucker. I am the curator of the Project Management Principles Program for Henry Stewart Talks. I have over 25 years of experience managing projects, programs in Fortune 100 companies. I live outside Washington DC and teach at the University of Georgia, the University of Virginia, the National Institutes of Health, and several international project management development companies. In this session, we will talk about project initiation.

So, project initiation, this is all about getting our project started. Why initiate a project? Why have projects? Our projects respond to needs and there's lots of different reasons, we may execute a project. There might be a market or a customer need, we see an opportunity in the marketplace, there might be social needs, health, education, welfare, organizational needs, or company, or organization needs to become better, faster, cheaper, we're reorganizing, we're entering new markets, we're doing things to help ourselves improve. There might be regulatory requirements. I spent most of my career managing financial systems in regulated industries and there, there's a change in the rules where you've got to change our systems or we have to change our processes. There could be technological advances. Just think about how things have changed in the last 15 or 20 years. All of the opportunities and all of the new things that have been created because of our mobile devices. There could be enhancement requests. For those of you that work in technology or software, quite often, we keep track of our customer requests and use them to develop our roadmaps. What are the things that we need to do to make our products more competitive to meet the needs of our customers? There could be environmental changes and for those of you that live near coastlines, a lot of our coastal communities are doing a lot of things to fight against the rising seas and the rising tides or to deal with the problems or the challenges caused by global warming or climate change.