Background

The intake process for the OIT Major Projects Portfolio seeks to ensure that the OIT Cabinet has the right information at the right time with which to make decisions on what projects the organization will focus on. To this end there are two steps to the approval process: Ideation and Elaboration. These will be detailed below.

Note: The process described here is managed using an application called the OIT Project Portfolio Manager. Details on the use of at application are provided in an article (KB0027816) that is available to logged-in OIT staff.

Roles and responsibilities

• OIT Cabinet - This is a body consisting of the Associate Vice Chancellor (AVC) of each unit within the Office of Information Technology  who approve project requests. The OIT Cabinet conducts a monthly meeting dedicated to reviewing project requests and the status of currently active projects.
• Request Owner - This is the individual who is responsible for documenting the project and managing its progress through the approval process. Once the project receives final approval the request owner role is no longer relevant.
• Sponsor - Project requests are “owned” by one or more units in OIT. The project sponsors are the AVCs of the owning units. The project sponsor speaks for the project request at the monthly portfolio review meeting, or invites the request owner to do so. In some cases more than one unit owns a project request, in which case the project request has more than one sponsor.
• Owning Teams - The owning teams are those that will have primary responsibility for the success of the project. The project manager for the project will typically come from one of the owning teams once the project request is approved. This is not a list of all teams involved in the project.

Stages of Project Intake

The stages of project intake are:

Ideation

All new project requests begin in the Ideation stage. This stage is designed to help the OIT Cabinet quickly understand your idea and decide whether it should move forward.

At this point, you do not need a fully developed proposal. Instead, the Ideation stage focuses on capturing just enough information to understand the purpose and potential value of the request. This allows ideas to be reviewed early and efficiently.

If the request is approved to move forward, the request owner will be asked to provide additional details so the OIT Cabinet can make a final approval decision.

Ideation-stage requests generally include:

• A short, high-level description of the idea or initiative
• A brief explanation of the problem or opportunity it addresses and why it matters
• The teams or groups that would likely be involved in the work

Initial Approval

In this step the OIT Cabinet will review the information provided by the request owner. The request will pass initial approval if all AVCs decide that the project should move to the Elaboration stage.

Elaboration

When a project request receives initial approval it moves to the Elaboration stage. In this stage the project request will be fleshed out with any information that the AVCs might need to fully weigh the merits of the proposed project. Once final approval has been given, this body of information is considered to be the project’s charter and will provide the basis for detailed project planning.

Requested information  includes:

• Project Manager - The proposed individual that will be responsible for organizing and managing the project activities. Usually this is a member of one of the owning teams, although it might occasionally be someone else. E.g. a member of the Project Portfolio and Process Services team.
• Project Owner - This is the key individual who is accountable for the project’s success. The project owner is responsible for determining how the project will meet the project deliverables defined in the charter, and for activities such as securing funding, advocating for the project with major stakeholders and resolving disputes. Sometimes the project manager and project owner are the same person. Typically the project owner is the manager of one of the owning teams.
• Planned start and finish dates - These are preliminary dates used to help the OIT Cabinet see the project in context of other planned work. Frequently these dates will change after final approval based on staff availability and shifting organizational priorities.
• Scope - This information describes what the project is expected to deliver, and what it will not deliver that one might otherwise expect.
  For example: “This is a proof-of-concept project. Only servers in the development and test environments will be upgraded. Servers in the production environment will not be upgraded as part of this project. The production environment will be upgraded as part of a subsequent project if the proof-of-concept is successful.”
• Goals - Which of the NC State IT Strategic Goals does the proposed project support? A project can support more than one goal. The strategic goals are documented as part of the NCSU IT Strategic Plan. [LINK]
• Milestones - These are the major phases or deliverables of the proposed project. Each milestone has its own planned finish date separate from the project as a whole. This allows the OIT Cabinet to get a better sense of what the project is expected to accomplish and to track progress once the project receives final approval. The exact definition of a milestone is up to the request owner to define.
  Milestones might be defined as phases such as “Planning, Execution and Closing”, development stages such as “Requirements, Design, Implementation, Testing, Go-Live”, or major deliverables such as “Migrate to Production, Deliver Documentation and Communicate to Stakeholders”.
• Resources - Each team that will be participating in the proposed project should be listed here, along with the estimated workload expressed as hours per week. These estimates are by their nature very preliminary. Detailed project planning will be performed once the project manager has been assigned and the core team has been assembled.
  At this stage the process has two goals:
  1) ensure that the OIT Cabinet understands the potential impact of the project on their units,
  2) ensure that the named team managers are aware of the project proposal and have a chance to provide feedback on the work estimates.
  Because detailed planning has not occurred at this stage these estimates do not constitute a binding agreement of any sort between the project manager and the team managers. Nevertheless, all resource estimates must be confirmed by the relevant team managers before the project can be reviewed by the OIT Cabinet. Any disputes between the request owner, sponsors and team managers must be resolved before the project request can be submitted for final approval.
• Risks - This is a list of known risks that threaten the project’s success, such as key staff or equipment availability and funding shortfalls. A mitigation plan should be provided for each risk that will guide the project manager on how to manage the risk should it occur.
• Assumptions - This is a list of assumptions that underpin the other parts of the project charter. Assumptions might include resource availability, stable costs, timely stakeholder approvals/feedback and reliable vendor performance.

Final Approval

Once the project request has been elaborated it will be reviewed by the OIT Cabinet at the next monthly Major Projects Portfolio Review meeting. If all cabinet members approve the project it will have a status of In Progress and be assigned to the listed project manager. At this point the project manager will assemble the core team, hold a kickoff meeting and begin the detailed planning process.

Changes to the project charter

Once a project has been approved the information provided during the Elaboration stage becomes the formal project charter document. Changes to the project charter after that point may require approval from the project sponsor and the OIT Cabinet. This process is out of the scope of this document, with the exception of planned finish date changes.

The project owner and manager can make changes to the project’s planned finish date at any time by submitting a project status update. The date change will automatically be added to the agenda of the next monthly OIT Major Projects Portfolio Review meeting. The date change can be assumed to be approved unless the sponsor or OIT Cabinet objects.