Project kickoffs can be the shortest individual component of a project, but they can also be the most important. Done poorly, a kickoff can feel like a reading of a contract by inhuman actors doing inhuman work. Done well, a kickoff can bring a team together and push them towards success. Kickoffs are one of the project skills we don’t get many opportunities to iterate and learn. Developers at Lullabot commonly end up attached to a client or project for many months (or years!) at a time, so it’s entirely possible to go that period of time without having a formal kickoff. Here are some thoughts I’ve had after doing several kickoffs this year.
About the Client
In a distributed team, a kickoff usually happens with a phone call. While pre-sales communication will have already happened, the kickoff call is usually the first time when everyone working on a team will be together at once. As a team member from the vendor, this is your chance to ask questions of the business stakeholders who might not be available day to day. I like to find out:
- Why are we all here? Are the business, technology, or creative concerns the primary driver?
- What is the business looking for their team to learn and accomplish?
- What are the external constraints on the project? Are there timelines and due dates, or other projects dependent on our work? What are the upcoming decisions and turning points in the business that could have a big affect on the project?
About Me
We all have ideas about how we want to work and be utilized on a project. Making sure they align with the client is very important to work out during a kickoff. Sometimes, a client has specific priorities of work to get done. Other times, they might not have realized you have skills in a specific subject area that they really need. It’s really important to understand your role on a project, especially if you have multiple skill sets. Perhaps you’re a great Drupal site builder, but what the client really needs is to use your skills to organize and clean up their content model. Figuring all of that out is a great kickoff topic.
About Us
Once we understand each other, then we can start to figure out how we work together. It’s kind of like moving in with someone. You might know each other very well, but how are you going to handle talking with your landlord? How are each person’s work schedules going to integrate?
For a distributed team, communication tools are at the core of this discussion. We all have email, chat rooms, instant messaging, video, and more. What tools are best used when? Are there specific tools the client prefers, or tools that they can’t use because of their company’s network setup? Finding the middle ground between “all mediums, all the time” and “it’s all in person until you ask” is key.
Recurring meetings are another good topic to cover. Some companies will take new team members, add them to every recurring meeting, and use up a 10 hour-per-week consulting engagement with nothing but agile ceremony. Perhaps that’s what you’re needed for—or perhaps they’ve just operated out of habit. Finding a good balance will go a long way towards building a sustainable relationship.
Sharing each person’s timezones and availability also helps to keep expectations reasonable. Some companies have recurring meetings (like Lullabot’s Monday / Friday Team Calls) which will always be booked. Sometimes individuals have days their hours are different due to personal or family commitments. Identify the stakeholders who have the “worst” availability and give them extra flexibility in scheduling. Knowing all of this ahead of time will help prevent lots of back-and-forth over meeting times.
Finally, find out who you should go to if work is blocked. That might be a stakeholder or project manager on the client’s side, but it could also be one of your coworkers. Having someone identified to the team as the “unblocker of work” helps keep the project running smoothly and personal tensions low.
About Tech
For development projects, the first question I ask is “will we need any sort of VPN access?”. VPN access is almost always a pain to get set up—many companies aren’t able to smoothly setup contractors who are entirely remote. It’s not unheard of for VPN access to take days or weeks to set up. If critical resources are behind a VPN, it’s a good idea to start setting that up before an official kickoff.
Barring the VPN-monster, figuring out where code repositories are, where tickets are managed, and how development and QA servers work are all good kickoff topics. Get your accounts created and make sure they all work. If a client is missing anything (like a good QA environment or ticket system), this is when you can make some recommendations.
About Onsites
Some projects will have a kickoff colocated somewhere, either at a client’s office or at a location central to everyone. In distributed teams, an in-person meeting can be incredibly useful in understanding each person. The subtle, dry humour of your video expert becomes apparent in-person, but could have been misunderstood online. Most of the above can be handled in the first hour of an onsite visit, leaving much more time to fill given the travel time!
We like to focus onsites on the topics that are significant unknowns, require a significant number of people across many teams, and are likely to require whiteboards, diagrams, and group brainstorming. Project discoveries are a classic fit; it’s common to meet with many different people from different departments, and doing first meetings in person can be a significant time saver. The goal of an onsite shouldn’t be to “kick off” the project—it should be to build the shared understanding a team needs so they can be effective.
But what about sales engineering?
I’m sure some readers are now thinking “Wait a minute! Aren’t these all things you should know before a contract is signed?”. It’s true! Going into a kickoff without any of this information would be a serious risk.
It’s important to remember that the team on a kickoff isn’t going to be identical to the team who did the sales engineering work. Both the client and the vendor will have new people just getting started. As well, it’s useful to hear the project parameters one more time. Discrepancies in the discussions can alert the team to any misunderstandings, or more likely changes in the business environment running up to the signing of the contract. Especially on projects where a team is already working, hearing about progress or changes made in the week between signing an SOW and kickoff can be invaluable.
What did you learn the last time you helped to kick off a project? Let us know in the comments!