Project initiation documents

Hi all

We have just completed a Discovery phase in Somerset and have the user stories and evidence we need to move forward with adopting Open Referral and a support finder tool to help people surface the services they need more easily. I’m just looking at what resource we need, drafting a PID and a plan etc and I was wondering if anyone has any of this from similar projects that they can share please?
Many thanks
Annie

Hi Annie – exciting to hear!

I have various examples that sound like they might fit what you’re thinking of, they’re scattered throughout our Pilots folder, but maybe I can find one to share as an example… and your question suggests that we might want to develop a template, which I agree. I can try to find some time to look into this.

Right now, I can say what comes to my mind, just as a framework that you can take or leave or adapt as you see fit:

I often try to draft a project brief that I share with key stakeholders to get everyone on the same page with a shared goal and objectives. Then soon after that (maybe not the next big step, but aiming in this direction) we work to develop a project charter.

In the project brief, here are usually the headers I use to structure a 1-2 page document:

  • Background (to introduce the context in which the document came about, and who drafted it.
  • Problem statement (along the lines of: this information is critical but maintained in many redundant silos which makes it hard to access services, coordinate care, and assess community’s needs)
  • Opportunity statement (here’s why this matters now – there are now standards to enable interoperability, open source tools, and political will to find new solutions for supplying this information to an ecosystem of tools and organizations, etc)
  • Project goal (big picture vision statement, something like: reliable information about all the resources available in our community should be easy to share find and use wherever people look for it)
  • Objectives (here’s where you’d specify your near-term action item – i.e. we will test the ability to share this database’s contents as open data for third parties to use, and develop proposals to scale and sustain that open data as a service.)
  • Key partners (who’s involved and what are their roles?)

And then things like key questions, milestones, needs, etc.

Once we’ve got all parties agreed to these basics, sometimes there’s work to be done and we don’t need to further formalize anything into a charter. Or sometimes there’s interest in developing a charter up front.

In my mind, here are the key elements of a charter:

  • Purpose statements: Vision, Mission, Values, Principles
  • Roles, Rights and Responsibilities: enumerating a set of roles and the rights and responsibilities of each.
  • Policies and Procedures: such as – how are parties added to this partnership, where/how/when will formal conversations happen, who makes decisions, how are decisions made, how are conflicts handled, how will parties leave the partnership, how will the partnership dissolve, and last but not least how can policies/procedures including (crucially!) the charter itself be revised.

So that’s a lot, I can provide some examples, but let me know if this is what you had in mind.

1 Like

Thanks Greg, we have various templates of that kind but i was thinking more along the lines of the content of it for an Open Referral adoption project. I guess it’s tricky as everyone is doing it in their own way, but it would be really helpful to see the type of resource, timeframes, process etc that others have followed.
Many thanks
Annie

@Ian-DigitalGaps has recently completed some research with Buckinghamshire, Hull, Kingston, Lancs & South Cumbria ICS, Lambeth, North Yorks, Nottinghamshire and Greenwich. He may have contacts for people with PIDs.

1 Like

@Annie You can read this research on our website Southwark Digital Directory of Services research

1 Like