The telecommunications world is a successful example of technology standardisation. In the mobile industry GSM gave the ecosystem (operators and suppliers) a set of standards that removed a lot of technology risks, enabled the birth of a large set of suppliers and product offering and gave customers roaming benefits and interoperability.

I have been working this year for a startup to help a former boss with project planning, with time I took a more active role and ended-up producing the project management plan to roll-out this company’s system.

I am writing this post to explain the overall PM approach we designed for this company and to get your feedbacks and recommendations. I always like a bit of a debate!

Right now we have not started the execution of the plan, so our approach has not yet been validated by experience.

This paper suggests a standard set of phases that are involved in the provision of outsourced IT solutions and this from the Selling organisation’s perspective. Those phases are presented in relation to each other and form a Phase Review Discipline (PRD).

The phases identified belongs to 3 distinct groups, Win Business, Delivery and Support and we will discuss all three groups here but in particular the Delivery group.

This paper aims at: – stressing the strong relation between sales processes and project delivery processes, and what it means for the supplier’s organisation. – suggest a standard approach for the entire lifecycle, from sales to support, and how it benefits the organisation, – suggest what role a PMO may have in an organisation adopting such a PRD approach.