What is a "typical" duration for how long it takes to start up a project?

Question

We are trying to put some statistics together internally to get a better handle on how long it takes to complete pre-project work for business improvement projects. This work includes work corresponds roughly to the "Starting-Up A Project Phase" from PRINCE2 and the "Starting the Project" part of the project lifecycle described in PMBOK. During this phase we are defining scope, high-level description of the project product(s) and high-level identification of resources so that we can develop documentation comparable to a project charter or project brief. We want to put stats together so that we can try to better time-box this phase.Given that all projects are different, are there any official statistics or anecdotes for how much time should be spent on pre-project work compared to actual project work? We would use this information to help us gauge whether or not our processes are more/less time consuming than they should be at a high level (e.g. if there is enough opinion out there that for a hypothetical 10 month project you should spend 2 months prior to this doing pre-project work, we would revisit our processes if our pre-project work took on average 5 months to complete).

Answer 1

Complexity of that 10 month project could define the timeframe needed. Two months sounds reasonable but politics and complexity could change that. significantly. Do you have a database of past efforts or could you create one. We had a large database of such things from past history, realizing that exceptions and variations will occur Perhaps you could go back and do that or find that information on the IEEE Computer, ACM, or PMI web sites. I think it also depends upon where you are in the planning cycle of your corporate year. Good luck.