Team Kickoff Meeting
A kickoff is critical when starting any project, whether complex and multi-faceted or simple and straightforward. Fundamentally, it’s about alignment.
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A kickoff is critical when starting any project, whether complex and multi-faceted or simple and straightforward. Fundamentally, it’s about alignment.
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Was this helpful?
Once you’ve done all your prep work, you’ll need to prepare an agenda for the internal project kickoff meeting and invite your team to the meeting itself. We’ve prepared an internal kickoff meeting agenda template for you to work from, as well as a sample so you can see how it’s done.
You’ll find the basic info in the internal project kickoff agenda sample and template but here’s a detailed walkthrough of the items and what they mean. Every project is unique, but there’s value in ensuring that we cover off some of these basics to get our team on the same page:
Start the meeting off by allowing your team to get to know each other. Whether your team is made of up of new folks or team members that have worked together on previous projects, starting off with an icebreaker or some chit-chat will help the team get to know each other (if they don’t already) and start to build positive relationships that will set the tone for teamwork throughout the project.
Ask team members to introduce themselves, their role, and background, and share a fun fact or tidbit about themselves.
Set the scene to help everyone understand the sandbox you’re playing in. Sharing is caring, so don’t hoard any logins or documentation to yourself. Share everything you know with the team so they can get up to speed themselves and empower and equip your team with all the relevant information they need to digest.
Share how you got to work on the project — Explain what you’ve done in the past with the partner, or with different partners but similar projects, and help the team understand who you’re working with.
We all know clients come in all kinds of flavours. But to our teams, they’re often the people who always make bad decisions. Try to position the clients in a positive light. To prevent any serious cases of foot-in-mouth, explain client distinctives to your team. Let them know who they are (internal/external), what we know about them, other projects they’ve worked on, and how the client likes to work.
To further help put the project into perspective you need to help your teams understand why they’re doing the project in the first place. This means sharing the client’s business drivers for initiating the project, and ensuring there’s clarity as to what success, or failure, looks like.
And from a customer experience perspective, initiate the discussion with the team around how this project makes people's lives better and meets their needs. Set a vision for why the team should care about the project and help everyone understand that what they’re doing is contributing to something that’s worthwhile.
Finally, you need to be clear about what a successful project looks like beyond simply delivering on time, on budget, and to the agreed scope. How are you as an agency going to grow as a result of doing this project – will you develop a new capability or competency with a new technology?
When the project background is set, it’s time to get into the scope details with the team. Normally that means reviewing the project timeline, estimate, project charter, and SoW (scope of work) so that everyone understands the flow of the project, the activities, and the outputs or deliverables. Without boring everyone to death, help them understand the quirks of the project, so the whole team is aware of the constraints from day one.
There’s nothing quite like a SoW review to get people talking about what’s going to go wrong. The sooner you know, the better.
If anyone’s tried this before and failed, why was it? And how can you mitigate against it? Knowing the insider track and your team’s unique understanding of similar projects will help develop a culture of openness and ensure surprises are kept to a minimum.
Reviewing the SoW and the proposed activities and outputs creates a great opportunity to discuss any process changes or new approaches the team wants to try. Remember that new isn’t always better, and tried and tested often works just fine.
Assuming the SoW has already been approved, remember that if you change the approach you need to ensure you’re still able to meet the project goals and that you’re still delivering what you promised. This isn’t just an opportunity to make life easier for yourselves.
Nonetheless, cultivate ownership of the project within the team. In order for the project to be a success, the team needs to feel like it’s their project. By leaving time and space for your team to suggest ideas, challenge your plan, and come up with a better way of working, you’ll end up with a much more robust approach and a much more engaged team.
When the team has had a chance to understand the project and the context of how they might fit within it, it’s worth clarifying the team’s roles and responsibilities. It can be helpful if you’re able to map their roles back to the SoW and clarify the deliverables associated with each area, why they exist, and what needs to happen to make them a reality.
It can be helpful to define a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) matrix against the SoW for the deliverables and the team. The RACI will help mitigate any uncertainty of responsibility and clarify your team’s comfort levels with delivery.
When bringing together a team that has never worked together before there’s going to be a range of understanding on:
How the team should work together
How collaboration should be managed
How communication should flow
When the team should meet
The tools that should be used
Which systems you’ll use to share deliverables or outline details of specific tasks
As PMs, our role is to make it simple, to put everyone at ease, and get people excited about working together on the project.
Often there’s no right or wrong to these approaches, but giving your team as much autonomy as possible is helpful in getting buy-in. You want them to feel like they’re masters of the project, and help them establish common goals for working together so everyone is accountable throughout the project.
Define your expectations and let the team agree together on exactly how they will deliver. By clarifying the teamwork and agreeing on the nuts and bolts part of how it’ll all get done, we’re helping manage our team’s expectations on what’s acceptable and what’s not.
There is a temptation to be a bit casual when starting a project — no one really knows what’s going on and it might even be that you, as the project manager, are actually the last to be brought onto the project. The way you manage the first few meetings and interactions sets the scene for the rest of the project.
To keep momentum going, be very clear about next steps. Make sure everyone is clear on what they need to do next and when they need to do it, as well as on any review milestones along the way.
This is your moment to be large and in charge! At this point you need to be very clear about what needs to happen to make the client kickoff meeting a success. Then, guide your team to work back from that.
Hold a Q&A session with your team members after you’ve covered everything else. This will give them the opportunity to ask questions to clarify, and team members will often point out a few things that you haven’t thought about or haven’t discussed with the client yet.