A Blueprint for Maximizing Your Project Kick-Off Meetings

While the purpose may initially seem clear (you are bringing people together to launch your new project), I 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 can you build in an element of planning, brainstorming, and decision-making? Consider how you can best leverage this opportunity and collect as many perspectives as possible into the necessary tasks and activities, key metrics, and team membership, etc.

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 identify all the members of your project team and steering committee during the meeting, and you leave the discussion with a complete list of participants, then you were successful in achieving that outcome.  By defining your goals in advance, this will help you define key elements to build into your kick-off meeting agenda.

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 and provides an opportunity for your project champion or sponsor to say a few words to motivate and energize the team for the work ahead. When you’re developing your kick-off meeting invite list, consider everyone that is knowledgeable about the subject matter, who might benefit from hearing the discussion, who has authority for key decisions that need to be made, who brings a historical perspective of previous conversations, who might be influential from a change management perspective, and finally, who might be directly impacted by the project outcomes.

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 ideal 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. 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. As additional elements of planning, brainstorming, and decision-making are added, the time required will also expand. 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.

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, I 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.

• 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?
• 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?

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 well-prepared to develop an agenda that sets you up for success. Your kick-off meeting agenda is your roadmap as 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. Consider adding times to each agenda item to support keeping the meeting on track and build in more time for activities such as brainstorming and planning discussions.