The Secrets to a Strong Project Kick-Off Meeting: How to Effectively Launch Your Next Project
What could be more exciting than engaging in a brand-new project? As project managers, we’ve found over the years that we thrive on the pure anticipation of what’s to come, and immediately begin to think about setting this initiative up for success.
With each new project, we are presented with an ideal opportunity to truly kickstart the planning, gain strategic or operational alignment, and communicate a common message to all our key stakeholders. With a well-designed and organized kick-off meeting, we can accomplish all these important goals, and gain that necessary momentum to set us on the right path.
Together, let’s explore the secret sauce to successfully launching your next project.
What is a kick-off meeting?
This initial, introductory session provides the perfect occasion to bring everyone together that have some level of interest (or “stake”) in the development or outcome of a new project.
The first meeting is a powerful way to gain interest and curiosity, communicate key information and messaging, and engage our stakeholders in dialogue to define our next steps. We are essentially announcing that this important work is kicking off and informing others how they can support the overall success of the new project.
What should I consider when planning a kick-off meeting?
There are several important considerations when planning your a kick-off meeting. These include the following key elements:
- Defining your meeting purpose
- Setting clear objectives and expected outcomes
- Identifying your meeting participants
- Finalizing your meeting logistics
- Defining your key messages
- Developing a well-structured kick-off meeting agenda
- Preparing your participants for the discussion
Let’s dig into each of these further.
Defining Your Meeting Purpose
While the purpose may initially seem clear (you’re bringing people together to launch your new project -obviously!), we invite you to think further about why you want to engage this group of key stakeholders during this valuable time together.
Will you use this meeting as a platform for information-sharing only? Or will you build in an element of planning, brainstorming, and decision-making?
Consider how you can best leverage this opportunity to collect as many perspectives as possible into the necessary project tasks and activities, key metrics, identifying any missing stakeholders, and more!
Setting Clear Objectives and Expected Outcomes
The objectives and expected outcomes determine what you want to achieve during your kick-off meeting and allows you to clearly define what success looks like. This develops your baseline to measure against later to see if your expected outcomes became your actual outcomes.
Think about what you’re looking to accomplish in this initial session. If one of your objectives is to finalize all the members of your project team and steering committee during the meeting, and you leave the discussion with a complete and final list of participants, then you were successful in achieving that outcome.
By defining your goals in advance, this will help you define key discussion items to build into your kick-off meeting agenda.
Identifying Your Meeting Participants
Inviting the right participants is essential to the success of your kick-off meeting.
Consider being as inclusive as you can at this point and invite key stakeholders from all levels. This allows everyone to hear the same consistent messaging at the onset of this work.
Invite your project sponsor and/or champion and ask them to say a few words at the beginning of the meeting to motivate and energize the team for the work ahead. This immediately sets the tone that this project is a priority to the organization, and participation is expected.
When developing your kick-off meeting invite list, consider the following and determine who is most appropriate.
- Everyone that might be knowledgeable about the subject matter
- Anyone who might benefit from hearing the discussion to gain an understanding of the project
- Anyone who has authority for key decisions that might need to be made during the project.
- Anyone who brings a historical perspective of any previous conversations or perhaps past projects that failed related to this work.
- Anyone who might be influential from a change management perspective
- Anyone you plan to have on the project team that will be supporting the work effort.
- Anyone who might be directly impacted by the project outcomes.
Finalizing Your Meeting Logistics
Planning your kick-off meeting well enough in advance provides you with flexibility when designing your meeting logistics.
Now that you have a full list of potential meeting participants, you can start exploring an ideal date, time, and location (whether in-person or virtual) that allows you to gain the greatest engagement. In case schedules are challenging, consider who your “must-have” invites are and make sure the meeting works around their availability.
Remember when we touched on defining the meeting purpose? Let’s consider this again when we think about the length of the kick-off meeting. If your intent is to have a meeting that is purely informational in nature, a shorter time frame is acceptable as long as you leave plenty of time to provide clarity, engage in discussion, and answer questions. An hour is typical for an informational kick-off meeting.
As additional elements of planning, brainstorming, and decision-making are added, the time required will also need to expand. Consider an hour and a half if you plan to spend time brainstorming the required tasks and activities needed to successfully implement the project.
Another important consideration is to provide enough time for introductions. New projects often bring forward new names, faces, and opportunities for relationship-building.
Build in enough time to incorporate these elements to ensure a successful kick-off.
Defining Your Key Messages
Once your meeting participants are identified and meeting logistics are in place, you can now define the key messages for this broader audience. This is the time to think about what information you can share about the new project at this time. When pulling this information together, we always return to the basics of communication including who, what, where, when, why, and how.
Consider answering these basic questions to start developing your targeted messaging and key takeaways for your kick-off meeting.
- Who – Who will be impacted by this new project? Who needs to be involved? Who are the key decision-makers? Who will be involved in the project planning?
- What – What is this project about? What information can you share? What information is not yet known that the project team will need to determine? What do you need from each of these key stakeholders?
- Where – Where will this new initiative be implemented? Where might we see the impacts of the project outcomes?
- When – When do you expect planning to start? When will the project team and steering committee meetings be booked? When might the project go-live and are there any hard dates we need to work around?
- Why – Why is this work important? Why are the meeting participants critical to the success of this new project?
- How – How will you get this started? How will people be engaged going forward? How will your meeting participants hear about progress?
Developing a Well-Structured, Kick-Off Meeting Agenda
By now, you’ve identified your meeting purpose, objectives and expected outcomes, meeting participants, logistics, and required key messages related to your new project. You are now well-prepared to develop an agenda that sets you up for success.
Your kick-off meeting agenda is your roadmap. It maximizes the use of everyone’s time and helps the discussion arrive at your expected outcomes. The content and sequencing of the agenda items is essential, and you should build in elements from the considerations above, and incorporate welcoming remarks and introductions, overall context-setting and details around the new project, time for discussion and questions, and expected next steps.
Here is an agenda outline starting point that you can then edit and make your own:
- Welcome and Opening Remarks – Consider having your sponsor or Executive sponsor attend and kick off the meeting discussion. This helps set the priority of the initiative and demonstrates that this is seen as a priority to the organization.
- Roundtable Introductions – Assume that everyone hasn’t all met each other and provide a quick opportunity to go around the room (or virtual room) and have each participant introduce themselves and what area or perspective they represent on the project.
- Project Overview and Charter Review – Set aside at least 20 minutes to bring everyone up to speed on the details about the project. You should include information about the project background, objectives and expected outcomes, what’s in scope and out of scope, key milestones and any known timelines, key metrics, etc.
- Review the Draft Project Governance Structure – Your Governance Structure should visually outline the various stakeholder groups identified (project team, sub-teams, steering committee, sponsor, etc.) and the expected reporting and communication structure.
- Finalize the Project Team and Define Meeting Frequency – Review the membership of your project team and invite feedback on anyone missing that should in be included at the table. Determine if the team needs to meet daily, 2x a week, weekly, bi-weekly, etc. to dig into the project planning.
- Brainstorm Required Project Tasks and Activities (OPTIONAL) – You may decide to build in extra time during your kick-off meeting to brainstorm with the larger group around what are all the tasks and activities needed to successfully deliver on the scope of the project. Facilitate the discussion and capture all ideas presented.
- Define Next Steps – Together as a group, discuss next steps including when meetings will be scheduled, and review any follow-up action items that were identified during the discussion.
Add times to each agenda item to support keeping the meeting on track. Build in more time for activities such as brainstorming and planning discussions.
Learn what to do after your kick-off meeting in our blog post: How to Manage a Project: A Step-by-Step Guide to Leading a Project from Start to Finish.
Preparing Your Participants for the Discussion
Set expectations for the meeting in advance by circulating a pre-meeting communication. Inform your participants by sending an email with any context-setting, the agenda, any documents they should review beforehand, and set any clear expectations regarding their attendance. You can also include any other expectations you have around how they should prepare for the discussion.
Take advantage of a second opportunity once the meeting begins to request their active engagement along with any other expectations that you select.
We encourage you to implement these key considerations and leverage the incredible opportunity of a well-designed and organized kick-off meeting. The time and effort will be worthwhile as you start your project teams on the right path to success.
Download Your FREE Kick-Off Meeting Checklist and Agenda
How can I learn more about meeting planning?
We invite you to learn more about meeting planning by joining the PML Tribe here at Project Management Life (PML), and familiarizing yourself with The 3 Step Meeting Framework(TM) outlined in the book Unleash Your Meeting Potential: A Comprehensive Guide to Leading Effective Meetings.
Also, check out our blog post called How to Manage a Project: A Step-by-Step Guide to Leading a Project from Start to Finish to learn more the entire life cycle of a project, and walk step-by-step through all the tasks and activities you should be considering when managing a project from start to finish.
Who is Project Management Life (PML)?
Project Management Life (PML) is a team of passionate project managers who believe in the power of this incredible profession and provide our knowledge, guidance, and support to our colleagues.
We know that project managers are often the unsung heroes that drive innovation and progress, and bring calm to what might otherwise be chaos. We are the leaders behind the scenes that work tirelessly, and deserve to be celebrated for our incredible efforts in making the world a better place.
We founded PML on the idea that we can inspire each other with stories of success and valuable lessons learned, empower each other with career advice and resources to thrive both personally and professionally, and support each other to achieve a fulfilling work-life balance by focusing on our health and well-being.
By living our best project management life, we bring our best selves to our projects, our teams, and the world.
We truly believe that project managers change the world.
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