Every project deserves its own private launch party – an event where the gang gets together to meet, celebrate and initiate the work they’re about to take on as one team.
In the real world, that party would be called the project kickoff meeting. A more or less formal meeting with a snazzy presentation and possibly a client and executive or two to give the nod of approval. But if you’ve ever held this kind of meeting, you’ll know there’s more to it than simply booking a time and sending a calendar invite (boring). Yes, you’ll need to put some solid effort into preparation if you want to reach and connect with the crowd (project team).
In this article we give you the lowdown on what project kickoff meetings are, what they should do, and we give you a 7-step structure to help you set up your next project launch party (kickoff meeting).
What Is A Project Kickoff Meeting?
A project kickoff meeting is the first get together of your project team where you launch a new project and establish its purpose. Depending on the type of project you're working on, it could include project team members only or external clients and stakeholders also.
The project kickoff meeting is normally:
- Hosted by the project manager
- Held as soon as the project contract, which confirms all parties involved have agreed on the statement of work, budget and timelines has been signed off
Do You Need To Have A Project Kickoff Meet?
Every project needs some kind of initial kickoff meeting that marks the official starting point for the work you and your people are about to embark on. For any initiative that depends on the effort of a combined group of people, who come from different fields of expertise, all wanting to deliver a unified goal, there needs to be clarity, centricity and collaboration. And that’s why it's important you prepare and set up a quality kickoff meeting which will establish the first foundations of the journey ahead.
Here, again, depending on the size and nature of your project, this initial meeting might be formal or informal. However, every kickoff meeting needs to share, establish and cover the basics of the project.
What Is The Purpose Of A Project Kickoff Meeting?
The purpose of a project kickoff meeting is to share key project information, introduce and connect project participants, and give everyone involved the opportunity to ask questions. So your focus throughout the meeting should be dedicated to these three key things.
Set Expectations Of Project Goal & Purpose
Most project managers send out the project plan along with the initial meeting invite. This is done so all participants can view, familiarize themselves and reflect on the project overview or statement of work before they come to the meeting.
However, during the kickoff meeting you’ll need to recap and brief everyone on the project’s:
- Core goal and purpose
- Scope
- Realistic expectations and project milestones
One thing to remember not to do is read off the project plan. These are long documents and chances are you won’t make the best use of your, or your audience’s time. The meeting should be an interactive session.
One of the best ways to do that is to create a presentation deck that covers the above three points and tells the story of the project in a clear, concise and visually appealing way. It also helps you engage with remote participants better.
When we say story, we mean any background information, such as past or current industry or business changes that have given rise to the project. This kind of context is important if you want your project team to understand the initiative as a whole and more than an isolated issue.
Establish Strong Collaboration & Stakeholder Relationships
The other thing you want to establish in this first meet up is relationships and strong team dynamics. As the project manager you are there to lead, but also to encourage and facilitate quality relationships and collaboration amongst the project team, stakeholders, and clients.
A couple of ways you can create this kind of atmosphere and increase collaboration are:
- Be frank and open about the kind of open relationship model you’d like the project team to run under
- Have everyone introduce themselves ahead of the meeting and share a couple of sentences about their role and expertise
- Lead by example by interacting with everyone equally and acting like the link between individuals who need to work together
If you can manage to get the entire team to open up and connect at this meeting, you will create a flow of seamless communication throughout the life of the project. This will also help you prevent roadblocks and avoid the most common causes of project delays.
Ask Questions
Finally, you want to use the meeting as an open forum where everyone can ask questions and express any concerns they may have about the project. A little bit like the last point on building good working relationships, great project managers know how to lead their audiences to speak up.
Types of Project Kickoff Meetings
There are different types of project kickoff meetings. While they all generally follow the same structure there are slight variations.
- Internal Project Kickoff – The simplest and most casual form that takes place with internal members only. Examples include a product marketing launch or web production.
- Executive Sponsor Project – A more formal meeting which includes executives and puts more emphasis on how the project will impact company objectives. Examples include product roadmap or large-scale marketing campaigns without an agency.
- External or Client-Facing Project – An even more polished kickoff presentation because it involves clients who you need to convince and impress. Examples include a marketing campaign being delivered by an agency or external event planning provider.
- Agile Project – A less formal meet that usually takes place once at the beginning of the project and maybe again throughout the year if new team members are introduced. Agile projects are normally software development initiatives which run in sprints of two- or four-week cycles.
Simple 7-Step Structure Of A Project Kickoff Meeting
Now that you know what a project kickoff meeting is and why you need to have one, let’s go through an outline of how you might structure your meeting.
Introductions
It’s hard to build relationships if you don’t know the people you’ll be working with, so the first step is to take care of introductions.
According to Forbes, it takes seven seconds to make a first impression. As a project manager and the kickoff meeting host, it’s your job to give everyone a chance to introduce themselves and make the best of it. Some team members will know each other already but there’s bound to be new people on board and possibly clients and stakeholders that need to be introduced.
A couple of tips for the introduction section of your meeting include:
- Introduce VIPs – First, introduce your executives, clients and any external stakeholders. Everyone on the project team needs to know who these VIPs are. They also need to know their names and roles.
- Go around the room – Dedicate a few minutes to go around the room or online meet and have everyone introduce themselves and say a few words about the role they’ll play on the project.
Project Purpose
Effective communication of the purpose is vital if you want the project team to embrace it. It’s also key to establish and show your client you understand the business drivers and aim of the initiative you are leading on their behalf.
So the next, and most important step is to define and talk about the project's purpose. What you want to achieve at the end of the meeting is alignment on this front. If you don’t, then you might need to go back to the drawing board until everyone agrees.
When going through the project purpose, be sure to talk about:
- Background – Get everyone up to speed on how the project came about, what issues or changes have taken place that resulted in the project’s formation.
- Purpose – Explain why the project is taking place and how it will impact the business’s organizational vision. Here, you explain the why of the project.
- Goal – Talk about the results you expect to achieve and what success will look like. Her,e you uncover what you will be working towards.
Project Plan
Your project plan is the project bible. It should have all the information anyone on the project team will ever need to answer any questions. Once you’ve covered the project purpose and everyone is on the same page, the next thing you should do is go through the project plan at a high level.
Try to focus on four or five of these key areas of the project plan:
- Project timeline – Start and finish dates and timeframes of various project milestones or phases help the teams grasp how much time each piece of work will take to be delivered.
- Milestones – Instead of having one long timeline, explain how the milestones have been segmented and the rationale used to divide the project in this way.
- Deliverables – Most important of all for this section of the meeting will be the final pieces of work, the deliverables that will bring the project to a successful close. You can make this bit interesting by including statistics and data which drives the message home of how beneficial the project’s completion will be towards various areas of the business, and primarily, your target market.
- Risks – While you don’t want to get too bogged down by the risk factors, if there are some major potential risks, do dedicate some time to go through them. This is something everyone should be across so they stay alert and know how to recognize any red flags throughout the project.
- Roles & Responsibilities – If it’s an internal project where everyone already knows who’s doing what, you might not need to go over the roles and responsibilities. However, if it’s a new team, it’s worth establishing the owners of the moving parts of the project.
Project Scope
Nobody likes scope creep. That’s why you should be crystal clear in the kickoff meeting about what is and isn’t in scope of your project. This helps ward off assumptions from the very beginning, manage expectations of the final product or initiative and prevent mid-project budget and work blowouts.
The project scope can be one of the most difficult parts of the kickoff meeting to manage. You might have a couple of strongly opinioned attendees who won’t back down.
A couple of tips for covering the project scope to minimize opinion clashes and scope expansion suggestions:
- Stick to approved plans – List what is in scope and what definitely is not. It helps if you can explain why certain things are and others aren’t included. Usually, these will be because of limited time or budget constraints. When you have reasons to back your scope, disagreements are easier to manage.
- Avoid lengthy discussions – While you want to give everyone the opportunity to speak up and share their insights and past experiences which may be valuable to the project, avoid having lengthy scope discussions take place in the kickoff meeting. These should have been held earlier in the project journey and if they do need to be held again, it might be a good idea to set up a new meeting.
Tracking & Communication
The other important thing that needs to be covered is project tracking, updates and communication.
There are a couple of things you should establish:
- Project collaboration tools – Provide details of the project collaboration toolgg you will use to manage the project, store project documents and set any guidelines on who will have access and act as the tool administrator.
- Communication SOP – It’s helpful to have some Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) around the communication process of the project workflows. This helps avoid miscommunication and workflow misalignment.
- Updates & notifications – Let everyone know where project updates and notifications will be sent and how often. Also, if there is someone leading project communications, make sure everyone knows they are the person to reach out to for sending out project-wide messaging.
Question Time
Before you close the meeting off, make sure you leave some time for final questions from the participants. It’s vital you hear what the room is thinking.
It’s up to you how you want to run your question and feedback time. You can go about it in two ways:
- Take questions throughout the meeting – Have participants ask questions throughout the entire meeting as you go along. While this increases interaction, it can also drag out the meeting because you’ll start and stop your presentation often and might lose track of where you left off.
- Have a Q&A session at the end – Allocate a block of time towards the end of the meeting once you’ve gone through your full presentation and have people ask questions. This is an efficient method because sometimes, you’ll answer their questions during the presentation.
Next Steps
Finally, to close the project kickoff meeting you can share the action items everyone will need to take care of to move to the next stage of the process, the project execution phase.
Usually this will include an email or some form of communications with things like:
- Project resources – Before your team can get started, they need to have the equipment and tools they’ll be using to carry out their tasks. So you’ll probably have a software platform for carrying out the project workflow and tasks. Here you’ll receive action items and update them as they progress.
- Documentation links – The other thing your team will need to access often is project documentation. So you’ll also include links to where all these documents live.
- Contact – Include a short list of key contacts for various project queries to help the team find the right support.
The Project Kickoff Meeting Checklist
Compile Invite List, Agenda & Documents
Before you set up your project kickoff meeting, you’ll need to do two things:
sEstablish the invite list – Using your project plan as a guide, work out who are the required and optional attendees.
Prepare the meeting agenda & gather documents – Structure the meeting agenda so you know how much time you will dedicate to each section. Also, gather all the documents or links to documents you’ll include in the invite for participants. Here you should have the completed project plan and possibly any other information packs from the project initiation phase like links to feasibility studies or risk assessments.
Send Meeting Invite
Once you’ve gathered all of the above, it’s time to set up the meeting and send the invite. If your meeting includes clients or external stakeholders, take care with how you position and word the invite. A casual tone might be fine for your internal team, but we’d suggest you stick to formal if executives are involved.
Within the invite you should include:
- Project plan – Attach the official project plan for reading and references for all participants, along with any other crucial project documents.
- Meeting Agenda – Include a breakdown of the agenda so participants know what to expect on the day.
- Action items – If you want participants to read the plan or come back with any questions, now’s a good time to say that.
Prepare Presentation
When you’ve sent the invite out, it’s time to get your presentation deck together and prepare for the meeting. How much you need to prepare, and how impressive your presentation needs to be, will be determined by your audience and organizational culture.
Here are a couple of tips and guidelines:
- Will executives be attending? Keep it professional and formal. You should also put an emphasis on talking about how the project relates and reflects on organizational business objectives.
- Are the clients going to be included? Get some help from the graphic design or digital team with your presentation. You want to impress them and this meeting is an opportunity to do that.
- Is it a small internal kickoff? If it’s a low-key kickoff meeting, you can keep it as casual as your company culture permits.
How ActiveCollab Helps You Set Up Your Project Kickoff Meeting
The project kickoff meeting is the first official meet of all your project team members before you move into the execution phase. It’s where you reestablish the project’s purpose and goal, and bring together the entire team for formal introductions and questions.
ActiveCollab is a project management and collaboration tool that simplifies and centralizes your entire project workflow. One platform that will take you from initiation, to planning, execution, and the final successful close of the project.
As an end-to-end project solution, it doesn’t just help you get the ball rolling to gather the team up for the first project kickoff meeting it also lets you:
- Onboard internal and external stakeholders in seconds
- Create project schedules for easy viewing and tracking in Gantt and Kanban views
- Assign tasks with due dates and link them in parent-child relationships to get things done in the right order
- Allocate budgets and resources to project tasks so your teams know what they have to work with
Marketing, events and service agencies love our tool as much as startups and growing consulting businesses do because our platform is powerful without being pricey. Whether it’s a small and short project or a large long-term client account, ActiveCollab lets you run your entire show, from idea to invoice, in a simple, easy-to-use setting.
If you need a reliable and mighty tool to set off your next project and take it to new heights, give ActiveCollab a try. Sign up to ActiveCollab’s 14-day free trial or book a demo for a guided tour!
