Getting a Project Initiation Document Approved

Once you've written the Project Initiation Document with sufficient information you need to get it approved. This usually means distributing it via the PMO to all the Stakeholders listed on the Distribution List within the PID and other interested parties such as Operations or HR for Resources. You will usually need to email the PID to all those listed and ask for comments back.

If your company has one, this stage will often be lead by the ITQA Team who will compile the comments and lead the Informal and Formal Reviews. The latter are meetings which the Stakeholders and Interested Parties will attend to discuss the PID in further detail. It is only after these stages are complete that your PID will be of a sufficient standard to be approved and passed onto the Programme Board for funding.

Depending on the complexity and size of your project these stages can be completed in anything from 5 Informal and 4 Formal Reviews for a $12 million project (not mine but one a colleague was managing!) through to simple email approvals with no Reviews for a project with a budget of $100,000.

However whatever the size of the project you need to be aware that there may be problems raised which have nothing to do with your project which relate for example to matters such as a shortage of resources or lack of finance. And unless you know what other projects are coming up you often won't realise that these problems are there until you circulate the PID and people start raising problems upon discovering the impact your project will have on their teams.

For example I once worked at a company where two enormous projects were in the pipeline both of which utilised the same resources and timeframes. Until both those project's circulated their PID's, no-one realised that one project would need to be prioritsed over the other due to lack of resources. However by the time this had happened a great deal of work had already been done on both projects, one of which essentially had to be put on hold until more resources could be recruited and trained up.

Project Initiation Document Approval Tip

It can be tempting to miss certain people who are perceived as being difficult from this stage because you know they will raise too many issues. However this would be extremely shortsighted. Get them involved at this stage and get their objections resolved now. Leaving it until later will simply cause even bigger problems, and make you look unprofessional.

The best thing when writing a PID is to talk to as many people in the various departments as you can. Find out what their upcoming workload is like, what other projects are in the pipeline, whether the company perceives your project as a priority and whether there are enough experienced resources to work on your project.