Mobilisation in Three Weeks, PID Not Signed
A hospital trust's project to replace its appointments system has just finished the initiation stage. The supplier's mobilisation window closes in three weeks, and the project board chair proposes approving the first delivery stage at a short informal meeting before the project initiation documentation is signed off, 'because nothing material will change'. Separately: the senior user was never appointed; the project brief was written by the project manager and approved by the chair alone; and the headline benefit - a 12% reduction in missed appointments - was assumed rather than derived from any user data. The board is next scheduled to meet in ten days.
1. Evaluate the chair's proposal against what the end of the initiation stage is supposed to achieve.
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The proposal inverts the control sequence. Initiating a Project exists to produce the project initiation documentation - business case, project plan, project controls, risk and quality approaches, tailoring, role descriptions - which becomes the baseline against which every later decision is judged. The board then authorises the project (Directing a Project, authorise the project), and only then does Managing a Stage Boundary produce the next stage plan and request authorisation of that stage.
Authorising stage one before the documentation is signed off means the stage plan is approved without an agreed business case, without agreed tolerances and without agreed controls - the project manager would be accountable for delivering against a baseline that does not exist.
'Nothing material will change' is precisely the claim the documentation exists to test, and in this project it is demonstrably untrue: the benefit is unvalidated and the senior user is missing.
The workable answer is not 'wait five weeks'. It is: complete and approve the project initiation documentation within the ten days before the scheduled board, and authorise both the project and the first stage at that meeting. The supplier mobilisation deadline is a risk to manage, not a reason to abandon the decision point.
2. What is the consequence of having no senior user and a project brief approved by the chair alone, and what should be done about the 12% benefit?
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Two controls have been bypassed at the point where they matter most.
No senior user. Starting up a project requires the project board - executive, senior users and senior suppliers - to be appointed before the project brief is prepared, because the brief must reflect user needs and the benefits to be realised. Without a senior user, the user community has no voice at the table and no one is accountable for confirming, later, that the product actually meets their needs. The project has been designed around a user community that has never been consulted.
Brief approved by the chair alone. The executive can approve within delegated authority, but if the other board roles were never appointed their approval was never available, which is not the same thing. The board should formally confirm the brief rather than let it drift into the project initiation documentation unexamined.
The 12% benefit. An assumed benefit is not a justification. It must either be derived from trust data (current missed-appointment rates, by clinic and by reminder mechanism) or restated as a range with stated assumptions and an owner. If it cannot be substantiated, the business case must say so, and the board must decide whether the project is still justified. That is the point of continued business justification.
3. Assuming the board does authorise the first delivery stage in ten days, what must it set, and why does that determine how Controlling a Stage will work?
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The board must set stage tolerances - typically time and cost, plus scope, quality, risk and benefits where relevant - for the stage it is authorising, and confirm the project tolerances it is itself working within.
Why it matters: tolerances are the mechanism that makes manage by exception operational. During Controlling a Stage, the project manager authorises work packages, monitors progress via checkpoint and highlight reports, takes corrective action and escalates. The dividing line between 'corrective action' and 'exception report' is entirely defined by the tolerances the board set. If they are unset or vague, the project manager either escalates everything (the board becomes a bottleneck) or escalates nothing (breaches surface at the end of the stage, when options are gone).
The board should also confirm, at the same meeting, the change authority delegated to the project manager and how urgent exceptions reach the board between scheduled meetings. Given the mobilisation deadline and the supplier risk already visible, that last point is not administrative - it is the control that will be tested first.