Attest Group believe the structure and governance of a project is critical to its success. This enables timely decision making and effective change management. Project initiation services focus on aligning the expected project outcomes to a defined mandate from the client. This mandate will be created with the client and identify key success criteria and how to quantify those criteria.

This service will detail key phases and milestones enabling the client to have a clear understanding of the project responsibilities across the parties involved ahead of the project commencement. This ensures the internal and external resources required to deliver the project have been identified and the skills sets and time commitments have been clearly documented and offers the opportunity to interview external resources to be engaged in the project delivery.

 
Another critical component to this service is to define and agree decision authorities and processes mitigating a common risk for project delays. Often this extends to cover escalation authorities and processes to further mitigate any risks and provide a clear pathway where a difference of opinions can be quickly resolved on any processes or decisions associated with the project.

Other core benefits include defining data migration and reconciliation responsibilities, best practice user acceptance testing, solution training and governance structures which aligns expectations from all parties and enables smooth transitions across the project’s phases.

 
We often find this pre-project phase is overlooked and is a common cause for project delays, budget overruns and misalignments of expectations. Typically, this process should only take one to two weeks to complete and can be executed during the procurement cycle for time sensitive projects.