Guide
The quick guide to the project kick-off meeting
Projects that start badly rarely recover. The kick-off is where expectations become explicit.
Projects sometimes get off to a rocky start because the team jumps straight in without knowing the client, or without surfacing the implicit and informal expectations that were never written down. The kick-off meeting exists to prevent exactly that.
What to settle in the room
Objectives and success criteria, scope and non-scope, roles and decision rights, the schedule and its major milestones, the known risks, and how the team will communicate. If any of these is still vague at the end of the meeting, it will cost time later.
Who should be there
The sponsor, the project manager, the business owners and the core contributors — plus the people who will have to say no to something later. A kick-off without the person who controls the constrained resource merely postpones the conversation.
Leaving with a plan, not with notes
End the meeting with a first schedule, named owners and a date for the next review. In FoxPlan the plan built during the kick-off becomes the working project immediately, so the momentum of day one is not lost in transcription.
