The Value of a Kickoff

Do your projects include a kickoff meeting or another type of kickoff experience? Out of all the elements of a process for our projects that we’ve tried at my current company, we’ve been able to drive the widest adoption of kickoff meetings.

If you work at an organization that has very little sense of what a project is or how to run one in an organized way, and if you find yourself teaching your coworkers about project management from the ground up as you are learning it, then this post is especially for you.

Philosophically, here’s what a kickoff is, and why I believe they have proven their value at my company:

Team alignment is required to achieve project results, and creating that alignment after the project is defined, but before work begins, is the most efficient time to do it.

A kickoff is simply an alignment meeting you hold with the whole team at this inflection point.

Practically speaking, I believe my coworkers have experienced several forms of value on projects with kickoff meetings, and therefore why I believe buy-in to these meetings is so high:

Team member decisions align more closely with project goals

You can try giving team members only the information directly relevant to their individual tasks. Some specialists will tell you they prefer this, as they’d rather spend more time working and less time in meetings. While this approach succeeds occasionally, the trouble is that all individual tasks need to integrate into the overall project deliverables and outcomes. That means that each individual worker needs to know how their work relates to the work of at least some other team members, and how it plugs into the big picture of the project.

This is why context is so powerful. Specialists need to make many little decisions in the course of their individual work, and in my observation they make many of those decisions differently (and in terms of the project, better) when they have the full context of the project and some sense of everyone else’s roles in the back of their minds. Because projects (and the environment around them) tend to evolve as progress is made, it is hard to predict which elements of context each team member will need—so in most situations, it’s best to give everyone all of the context, at least at a high level. Conveniently, if you can get everyone in a physical or virtual room at the same time, this means you only need to review this context once.

Reduce rework

And this is where your meeting-averse specialists will likely come to value kickoff meetings, because I find these same people tend to hate rework. Decisions made in isolation from the context of the project tend to lead to work that is not approved or requires changes to bring it into alignment. This is tiring and demotivating for team members, to say nothing of the expense to your company. Setting up team members for better decisions reduces rework and leads to better task and project completion times. As the project leader, this will win you fans.

Reduce other meetings and communications later

As with reducing rework, you can also save team time and energy by reducing the need for meetings and communications later in the project. You will need some communication throughout the project, of course, but in my experience, after a good kickoff you need less.

When I occasionally manage a project that skipped a kickoff, I get lots of emails and instant messages from individual team members with the same questions that I need to answer repeatedly, and I need to arrange multiple meetings to create alignment in focused areas of the project that might not have been necessary if alignment had been created for the overall project at the beginning. I get team members heading off in different directions, and my project leadership experience starts to feel much more like herding cats.

What if one person asked a question in the kickoff meeting, and everyone heard the answer, and then the matter was closed? Or if an aspect of the project was explained once, and that was sufficient? Seriously, then everybody wins.

Increase accountability for distributed teams

There is much discussion on how to counteract the downsides of teams that are not colocated, so companies can continue to take advantage of the benefits. A kickoff meeting creates a small point of unity for a team around a specific goal, where (on a video call) they can look at the faces of the other people who are counting on them to get their work done, and also feel a more shared sense of accomplishment in the project results.

What about agile projects?

Admittedly, most of the projects I support in my current role are toward the waterfall end of the waterfall-agile spectrum. Kickoff meetings or calls are particularly powerful on waterfall projects, because the goal is to do most planning up front and minimize change once work has started. On agile projects, by contrast, you are already expecting a high amount of communication throughout the project life cycle, and potentially a high amount of “rework” in the form of iterations to bring you to the optimal project result. In this setting, a kickoff is less critical, but still valuable. You would spend your kickoff building alignment around the project goal or outcome, without getting into the weeds on deliverables. This alignment will still send everyone in the right direction and serve the team and the project well.

Ready to give it a try?

If you propose a project kickoff for the first time, you probably won’t get high enthusiasm for an extra meeting at first. But after a few projects of people looking back and noticing, “wow, that project went smoother than usual,” I think many of your team members will come to trust a kickoff meeting as a worthwhile part of the project process.

If you’re ready to give your projects this simple, powerful element of structure, check out my in-depth guide to implementing your first kickoff meeting.