When did your project start? – The software supplier's perspective

•We study software development projects in supplier firms.•Project managers assign a project start date differently even within one company.•A project may lose knowledge, profitability, and be late before its start.•We suggest definitions related to project start and project start date.•We emphasise the need to study software development projects in a business context.

A software development project may be considered a failure because it is late. In order to be able to assess this, a project start date should be known. The purpose of the paper is to study software development projects in a business context and especially project start from the supplier's perspective. In our research, we observed different ways of assigning project start but did not observe any company-level instructions for defining it. We raise questions regarding knowledge loss, project profitability, and having a project running late even before the project has started. We provide definitions for project start and project start date, and define boundaries for software supplier's project start-up. With this paper, we emphasise the need to study software development projects in a business context. The paper contributes to research on project management success, the software project business, and the management of a software project in a business context.