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Five Steps to Kicking Off the Project Right

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Doing it right the first time is always a good idea. And when you’re talking about kicking off a long-term IT project worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s essential because you’ll usually find that your project schedule and your budget doesn’t have much of an allowance for rework. When we start a project, we want to make sure we have everything in place so that our team and our customer are as focused and equipped as possible to help us run a successful engagement.

To that end, there are five critical steps to run through to make sure you kick off the project right. To help ensure that you’re ready to meet with the customer, establish the ground rules, and move forward with the subsequent phases of the project.

These five steps are:

1. Gain proper handoff from Sales

The deal closer in your organization – whether that’s Sales, the account manager, or maybe a PMO director – has the original project materials and you, as the project manager, need them. Hold a quick handoff meeting and get all materials transitioned to you because those materials will be the basis for everything you put together in planning out the kickoff and the rest of the project.

2. Draft a project schedule, budget, and resource plan

From the handoff materials, the next step is to put together a project schedule, a draft budget for the project planned out by a week or by phase, and a resource plan that identifies when and what resources are needed on the project. Most of this will likely come from a statement of work and whatever materials Sales used to put together a sales price for the project. Ideally, you’ll have someone from your project team to assist you, but at this point, it may just be you.

3. Engage the customer and set kickoff expectations

Next, introduce yourself to the customer and set up the formal project kickoff meeting. Set expectations for the meeting including the number of attendees the customer should bring. I’ve lead project kickoffs where the customer brought 25-30 representatives. What this often results in is a question and answer session that takes over the kickoff meeting leading to lots of necessary discussion being left on the table due to time constraints. This has been a checkpoint discussion with the customer for me ever since so that history doesn’t repeat itself.


 

4. Hold a formal project kickoff session

With your materials in hand, put together a formal presentation that addresses key dates, deliverables, assumptions and lays out how you plan to manage the project. The kickoff session is all about setting expectations and laying the groundwork for what is to come and a chance to ask questions to fill in the gaps.

5. Adjust expectations, the schedule, etc. and move forward

There will always be post-kickoff session changes to be made based on the discussions that took place during the formal meeting. Adjust the project schedule, budget and resource plans, and any key assumptions based on these discussions and prepare your team and customer for the next phases of the project.

6 Steps for Effective Project Management Meetings

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The project manager is the project leader– the person who controls the project, manages the team, the customer, and the flow of the entire project engagement from start to finish. The effective project manager strives to keep their team, the customer and the entire project team well engaged throughout the project – entirely focused on the end goals of the project. Effective project management meetings are a key factor. An integral part of that management process is planning, conducting, and participating in the regular and ad-hoc meetings that happen throughout the project. They are a key part of the overall project communication process. The project manager who effectively manages those meetings can keep their team and customer accountable and engaged…while the project manager who turns out to be a poor meeting planner and manager can slowly lose meeting attendance and participation. People are busy and, yes, our project resources have other jobs to do, so it’s imperative that we manage their time well. A major part of that is ensuring that the meetings we schedule for them are worthwhile and productive while keeping their involvement to a necessary minimum. How do we do that? For me, it involves following these standard principles for good meeting planning and management…

1. Publish an agenda. 

Knowing what to expect helps everyone to prepare. It may be enough – if everyone is familiar with your meeting processes – to just send out a status report in advance of every meeting as long as all participants understand that this report is the meeting driver and the bullet points on it are basically the agenda. For non-standard and ad-hoc meetings you’ll still want to be sure to send out an agenda in advance to all participants. The discussion will be much more productive when everyone knows what topics will be discussed in advance.

2. Stay on time. 

Project meetings that start on time, stick to the time frame, and end on time will keep participants engaged and keep the meeting upbeat and productive. If your attendees know that you’re not the type of project manager who lets his project meetings regularly run overtime, then they’ll be focused on the meeting topics and not what other tasks they should be performing instead. Start it on time, be productive, and then end it.

3. If they’re late, let them catch up. 

If you are the type who likes to catch latecomers up as they arrive, then you’re feeding them and they will keep coming late. Avoid rehashing everything for the people who come or call in late – it’s their problem and they will have to worry about catching up on their own. Don’t be above reprimanding them if their missed participation was critical to the discussion. Don’t overdo it, but a little call out may ensure that it doesn’t happen next time.

4. Let them go. 

When the meeting is over close it out with a brief wrap up and let them know you’ll be sending out notes for key participants to confirm understanding and then end the meeting. Save the idle chatter for the desk or water cooler – you don’t want to be the person with a reputation for wasting everyone’s time.

5. Hold it anyway. 

If it looks like there’s really nothing new to be discussed during a regular weekly project meeting, hold it anyway…just keep it short. If you frequently cancel these meetings then your attendance and participation may dwindle. It’s easier to keep people engaged than to get them to re-engage. People sometimes say otherwise, but in general, everyone likes organization and a schedule. Even if it’s a 5-minute meeting to ask if there are any key points that need discussing, hold it. You may keep something critical from falling through the cracks.

6. Publish brief meeting notes that emphasize action items. 

Finally, always follow-up with a  status summary of what was discussed, decisions that were made, action items that were assigned, etc. I usually do this as revised notes on the actual status report that I sent out and used to drive the meeting. I send it out via email and ask participants to respond if anything appears to be inaccurate or if something critical was missed. The goal is to make sure everyone comes out of the meeting on the same page and these notes can help ensure that. Keep the meeting notes and updates stored with the project for referral purposes.

https://www.wildapricot.com/articles/how-to-write-meeting-minutes

Summary

Meetings are often considered ‘necessary evil.’ They have to happen, but many hate to attend them and participate in them. As long as your planned attendees know you have a reputation for managing your meetings well and that you expect everyone to be prepared and ready to participate then your meetings should end up being productive and well attended. That’s really all you can ask for and expect.