Project Initiation

There is a common antipattern which states the analysis is an initial project phase. Although it could be like that, it could also be the other way around. The analysis may be carried out independent of any project, and what is more, the analysis could even be a trigger of a new project.

Scenario #1

A project may start right after the business problem has been identified. For example, if a bank must implement a new regulatory requirement, there is usually no dedicated department which would drive the implementation. Even though there is a department responsible for assuring that all regulatory requirements are met (Compliance), they understand just what the bank must do to be compliant with the law. They have no idea what impact it will have on people, processes, systems, etc. This is a frequent scenario in large enterprises where a lot of business changes with big impacts are going on. Such changes require an extra phase to understand the problem and to map the current state. In this case, the project is started right in the beginning aiming to find the best solution and implement it.

Scenario #2

Following the previous example, the regulatory requirement may also be first pre-analyzed by a business analyst outside of any project. The project would be started only after the solution was selected, so the project would be responsible only for delivering the solution, not for identifying it.

Scenario #3

In some cases, there is no covering project which would deliver the whole solution, but there are only sub-projects that implement the individual solution components. As a result, each project performs the solution analysis itself, and the projects could be run both in-house and outsourced.