Introduction

This chapter defines the inception phase of a project. If process ideas are not your priority, or you prefer to first focus on learning the main practical activity in this phase—use case modeling—then this chapter can be skipped.

Most projects require a short initial step in which the following kinds of questions are explored:

• What is the vision and business case for this project?

• Feasible?

• Buy and/or build?

• Rough estimate of cost: Is it $10K-100K or in the millions?

• Should we proceed or stop?

Defining the vision and obtaining an order-of-magnitude (unreliable) estimate necessitates doing some requirements exploration. However, the purpose of the inception step is not to define all the requirements, or generate a believable estimate or project plan. At the risk of over-simplification, the idea is to do just enough investigation to form a rational, justifiable opinion of the overall purpose and feasibility of the potential new system, and decide if it is worthwhile to invest in deeper exploration (the purpose of the elaboration phase).

Thus, the inception phase should be relatively short for most projects, such as one or a few weeks long. Indeed, on many projects, if it is more than a week long, then the point of inception has been missed: It is to decide if the project is worth a serious investigation (during elaboration), not to do that investigation.