What happens before a project starts? Project start-up from the supplier perspective

Before an outsourced software project officially begins the contracting or supplier organization has already expended effort. Although project start and start-up effort impact on project success in most cases these are undefined concepts. There are no clear definitions of project start, start-up or the activities that should be completed before project start either in the literature or in practice. Ambiguity around project start sets up risks to the profitability of a project and therefore makes the real success of a project not only uncertain but difficult to measure. A vague project start also makes comparisons between projects and between organizations unreliable. In this paper, we describe a pilot study that reviews project start, project start-up, and project start date, and then investigates what the key activities of the supplier are normally performed by the end of the project start-up phase.We use interviews with software supplier practitioners to define those key activities.