Defining your EDRM project

The infoKit section on project start-up contains six sections:

• Sponsorship

• Defining the project

• Stakeholders

• Building the project team

• Setting up the project infrastructure

• Costing the project

These are all relevant to an EDRM project and we will use them here to review the questions you should ask and the tasks you should try to undertake to clearly define your EDRM project. Project definition is the most important area.

Sponsorship

If you are planning to implement a corporate EDRM solution then it will be one of the largest if not the largest IT project ever undertaken at your education organisation.

The first thing this implies is that you need sponsorship at the highest level. The budget will simply not be forthcoming if this is not seen as a strategic investment by the senior management team. Hence you need sponsorship from the top. This is vital to obtain the budget approval. It is also vital when you start asking busy staff to spend time assisting you with the audit or to volunteer their faculty or section to be the guinea pigs and pilot the solution.

Defining the project

This is the most important part of stage two. According to the infoKit in an ideal world there would be four documents produced to define the project:

• Project brief

• Business case

• Project Initiation Document (PID)

• Project charter