The day has finally arrived and as a project manager, you feel confident that you have everything in place to kick-off the project and set the team running. But how do go you about this? Has the team prepared enough to start the project? Are all the processes in place? Thanks to project management skills, this can be done properly and the team can begin energized and confident about the task ahead of them. As PMBOK expresses, this meeting signals the end of planning meetings and signals a new dawn when execution gets a go-ahead. The significant role of this meeting is to introduce the team and help them understand what the project is all about and help every one reach a common level of understanding, help the team to commit to the project and finally to explain the roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder. It guides the team to have a clear vision of how success looks like, understand what os actually to be done and come to an agreement on how to work together effectively.
There is no single template on how this meeting is carried out to set the right tone for the project but surely there are guidelines of project management that enhance best practices.
In my experience, working alongside these principles of project management as suggested by PMBOK, when working with small projects of about 4~5 members, it is normally a routine that all members are involved in the planning and execution phase. Since all members are involved from the beginning, we naturally tend to have the same pace of natural flow and understanding, making it easier to begine the project shortly after initiation (Planning Process Group). These will typically be projects that run for maximum up to a month.
For projects that run between 1~3 months, it is then better that the the PM team gets involved in the planning and the team is involved in the tail end of the planning phase. This has two advantages: firstly, it helps to make quick and sound decisions provided the key stakeholders are involved, secondly, it makes it possible for the team to continue with other tasks hence not experiencing unnecessary faigue and lack of concentration. This will normally take place within processes in the executing process group.
Very large projects that are usually cross-departmental and are multiphased, have kick off meetings at every phase gate of the project. This is the opportunity for the team to be rest assured that indeed the previous phase is “certified” and they are ready to process to the next phase. But how will the project manager actually go through this phase? Don’t miss out on my next post “Project Kick-Off meeting – In the footsteps of the project manager.”
Project Management 