Project Intake Form: Create and Monitor Them in 3 Effective Steps

When thinking about project requests between different groups, what does that look like? Is it stopping by someone’s desk, making a quick phone call, sending an email noting all that something’s needed now? Or scratching a project idea on a napkin and passing it on to someone in hopes it’ll move forward? If these requests aren’t organized in some fashion and given a process a system to manage, the snowball effect of piled up requests will eventually turn into chaos and cause an exhausted and frustrated team. So how would you go about orchestrating order and providing clarity for all? By effectively creating and monitoring a project intake form, your project sponsors and team will have clear direction on goals, process, and expectations between roles.

Here are 3 effective steps to take when creating and monitoring a project intake form.

First, start with the people – gain an understanding of the project needs.

Start by asking the project sponsor questions that will help you learn about the project objectives, any stakeholders required to support the request, the budget approved for the effort, and timeline. As you gather project sponsor needs, it is also important that the project team is aligned and given an opportunity to state other elements needed to help them achieve the project goals.

Here is an example of some components on a project intake form that would help a project sponsor input needs for webinar campaigns, while allowing the project team to call out required elements to successfully build, test, and deploy the project. Noting which components that will be required versus optional, or even text based, are helpful as well.

Project requestor information

Project objectives

Event information

• Webinar name
• Email campaign name
• Landing page location
• Target audience for event
• Project stakeholders for UAT and/or final approvers

Completion deadline

Budget expectations

Additional requirements

When you’re ready to finalize the project intake form components, make sure you’re also using agreed upon language between the project sponsors and the project team. When a common language is not agreed upon, there will be confusion on the request.

It’s also best to standardize the questions to be included on the form. By keeping the questions and order of the questions consistent, it allows you to organize the data whether that’s by sorting, using filters, or finding themes.

Where possible, also consider project intake form components that could include any picklists. This keeps any data uniform without relying on the project sponsor or project team member to manually input information. It eliminates room for error, such as typos, and also creates more clarity for the project team. For example, if there are specific webinar names or target audiences known for a repeatable schedule, provide a list of names to choose from.

So what’s next? Put a process in place.

While it’s easy to identify that the project intake form submitters are likely the project sponsors, how the data will be reviewed and worked on is also important in building out the process.

Once a project intake form is submitted, you’ll want to confirm who is reviewing and responding to the project sponsor on receipt, progress, questions, and completion.

There also needs to be an internal project team process of how project requests will get assigned to build, test, and deploy. Most of the time including a status field is the most efficient approach. This can also be a picklist with options such as Not Started, Build, Ready for Internal Testing, Internal Testing, Ready for UAT, UAT, Ready to Deploy, Launched.

In most project efforts, the process looks like this: project sponsor completes and submits the project intake form, the project team receives it, an appointed role reviews the requests and ensures all the necessary components are clear, the assigned project team members work the request and tests with the project sponsor, and then the project is launched.

Once the process is fully documented, run through it with the appropriate project sponsors and project team members. Documenting the process also allows for seamless and consistent training to support any stakeholder changes or team expansion needs. Establishing a regular meeting cadence with your project sponsors and project team are also important. It provides the team an opportunity to review project status and address any issues.

Finally, find a tool that can support creating and monitoring the project intake form.

The project team may have multiple systems to choose from depending on the project intake form needs. If the request process is simple with less fields, the team could use a project collaboration tool with less sophistication. Other times systems with advanced features and capabilities may be more ideal, such as providing the ability to send notifications to project sponsors and project team members. Notifications could include project status, communications between teams, or auto generated messages sent to email inboxes or within the tool itself.

Whether using sophisticated tools or not, it’s to be considered the last piece of project intake form requests. Start with the people, build out a process, and then find the best system solution to support the project needs.

Want help with creating and monitoring a project intake form and process? Relationship One is here to help, contact us today!

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