Initiating
To officially initiate the project management intranet site project, Erica knew that the
main tasks were to identify all of the project stakeholders and to develop the project charter.They decided that key team mem-
bers should include one of their full-time consultants with an outstanding record, Michael
Chen; one part-time consultant, Jessie Faue, who was new to the company and supported the
Project Management Office; and two members of the IT department who supported the cur-
rent intranet, Kevin Dodge and Cindy Dawson.After Joe and Erica made the preliminary contacts, Erica documented the stake-
holders' roles, names, organizations, and contact information in a stakeholder register, a
document that includes details related to the identified project stakeholders.Because many other
people would be affected by this project as future users of the new intranet, Joe and Erica
also identified other key stakeholders, including their directors of IT, Human Resources (HR),
and Public Relations (PR), as well as Erica's administrative assistant.Recall from Chapter 1 that stakeholders are
people involved in project activities or affected by them, and include the project sponsor,
project team, support staff, customers, users, suppliers, and even opponents to the project.A stakeholder analysis is a technique that project managers can use to help understand
and increase the support of stakeholders throughout the project.Additional outputs that Erica
found very useful for initiating projects were a stakeholder management strategy and a formal
project kick-off meeting.Descriptions of how these outputs were created and sample docu-
ments related to each of them are provided for this project.