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Project Approach
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The Project Approach refers to how the project will be managed – in other words, the doing of the project. The Project Approach will help you decide how you should run the project, not deliver the benefits.
How you choose to run a project will have implications for the business case and the Project Initiation Document, so you should try to decide and get agreement to the approach as soon as possible. The best way to define what will work best for the project is to identify:
- Potential barriers to the way the work of the project must be carried out
- The skills needed to conduct the work of the project.
You may find you need the input of specialists to advise on what may be the best way of doing things, for example whether it can be managed in-house; whether it needs to be out-sourced; or whether specific expertise is needed on some aspects of the project.
Remember that the ‘project approach’ is not the same as the ‘options appraisal’ within the Business Case, which is about identifying the different ways to deliver the required benefits.
Administration
The Project Approach should also highlight the overarching principles of the project administration. This is important to do early on as it sets out for the emerging team and colleagues, the basis for:
- Version Control - how to record that a document has been updated so that everyone can work from the correct version
- Project Filing Structure – increasingly this will refer to an electronic library, but it is essential that you get this right at the beginning. Projects create a lot of documents and being able to track and find them is important not just for the smooth running of the project, but also in case of any project reviews that might take place, as well as legal requirements such as the Freedom of Information Act.
If your project requires external or internal parties to be contracted, then you should read the next section on Commissioning. Otherwise, you should skip this section and go to the stage where we pull all of the previous work into one of the key documents in the Sheffield Project Management Process; the Business Case.
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