Speaker 1: Are you getting ready to start a project and want to know how to run a successful kickoff meeting? Well, in this video, I'm going to share with you five critical elements that you need in order to run a successful kickoff. And if you want to slay your project, stay tuned to the end because I'm going to give you a checklist on how to ensure your projects don't fail. Hi, if you're new here, welcome. For the best career and project management advice, subscribe to my channel, hit that bell button and a brand new video is going to come to you every Wednesday. When done right, kickoff meetings can be inspiring and fun and they are critical because they're going to set the tone. So let me show you how to do just that. Before I go into the five key elements that you need, there are two critical items that you really have to think about and we have to talk about right now and that's timing and purpose. A lot of times with timing is people do a kickoff meeting as soon as they get their project. Don't, don't, don't, don't. You have so much to do in preparation of that if you were to throw your kickoff meeting now when you just got information, then people would be excited and then you would have nothing to give to them and they'd walk away and then how do you reinvent that excitement? So the timing is really important. You need to do it once you get all your information. So once I give you those five steps, then you're going to do your kickoff meeting. Now the purpose, here's something else that people also have trouble with, is the purpose of your kickoff is to ensure that your team is set up for success, that they have everything they need at their fingertips. And a lot of times with kickoff meetings, they don't because you do it too early. That's why the timing and purpose are so critical. And when you think about purpose and because you're giving everything to your team, the length of the meeting is really important. An hour meeting is not going to do it for a kickoff. You have way too much to do and when I go through those five steps, you'll know why. There's way too much to do. You need at least minimum half a day and depending on what you actually need to accomplish, sometimes it can be up to a full day or even a day and a half. Now don't get overwhelmed because I'm going to show you how to do everything next. Okay, now that you understand how important purpose and timing is and the length of your meeting, let's now talk about the elements, the five critical elements you need in your actual kickoff. Think of them also as activities. So activity number one, charter introduction. All right. This is going to be important. This is setting up your project. You would have done all your prep work. This is your charter document. This is basically the team is now going to know for the first time why they're being called, what's the purpose, what's the scope, what are some high level milestones, all the critical elements they need so that if they were to start working on the project tomorrow, they could because they have the information. So introducing your charter is critical and this is the time to do it because you want to have them ask questions and to be able to answer them. Also to get any other additional information that maybe you just didn't have and you need from your subject matter experts who are now your team members. Activity number two, project team expectations. A lot of times people don't think to even go here or even ask this question. What do you expect as a project manager or as a project leader from your project team members? And then I do a reverse. What do they expect from me? If you're at a kickoff and you're now introducing everything, it's the perfect time to ask this question. You may have had some past experiences on other projects that did not work well and you don't want to have them repeat those same mistakes. So this is a great time to really set it out very clearly. What are the five, eight, maybe even 10 things that as a project team, you have expectations from each other so that you can actually call people when they actually don't do what they're supposed to do and you all agree to it. Perfect time to do it. Nobody's charged. Everyone's excited about the project. Neutrality is there and you're going to get the right things identified. Activity three, action plan validation and finalization. So you want to use your kickoff meeting. You want to get everything that you need because you have everybody together. Remember, this is not an hour meeting. This could be a half day meeting, a full day meeting. It's kind of like a workshop. And if you don't want to call it a workshop, call it a session because it's definitely not a meeting where you're just talking. You're actually getting some stuff. So you've done the charter, you've done your expectations. Now, because you've done all the prep work prior to, you probably have some high level ideas as to what the project has to execute on. And this is where you want to give it to your project team members. Have a little workshop around it. Have an activity on, let's finalize all the tasks. What's really great about this is it brings accountability because the subject matter experts are now saying, here's what I have to do in order to achieve this scope statement and reach this deliverable. They're now thinking it through. Not only that, because when you call a kickoff, you want people to be working on things really ideally the very next day. Well, they've just now confirmed action items. So they can actually do something the very next day because they called it out themselves. All you got to do is clean it up and put it in a central location. So this is a wonderful activity and a must in my books. Not only do the charter, but get your action item plan validated from the initial look that you did to the finalization with the team. Activity four, project timeline finalization. Now I'm going to give you a little disclaimer here. Sometimes you get to this, sometimes you don't. It really is dependent upon how much time you have. But if you really do have the time, after you're done all of the activities that you've done with the action items, you want to then validate the timeline to ensure that all your different groups and dependencies, they're not overlapping. Are they feeding into each other properly? And you can easily do this in a workshop type setting. So if you can get to this activity, it is great to do it here at your kickoff. However, I'm going to give you a caveat. It's usually 50-50 for me in regards to me being able to actually do this activity. Depends on how much time I'm given. But the beautiful thing is people usually say to me, let's have another meeting and actually do that workshop of getting our timeline. Last activity, project team next steps. So wherever you're ending off, so if you have the ability to do all five elements and you were able to get in the timeline, then you would definitely go next steps. And let's say you don't get to the timeline, you still have to talk about next steps. So you have to ensure next steps is always in your kickoff meeting. Now what are those next steps? Those next steps are now that you have this information, whatever parking lot items you collected from questions, you as a team have to discuss what's going to happen tomorrow. When are we going to have our meetings? Where are we going to store everything? Are we going to have that timeline meeting because we didn't get around to it? So as a group, decide what your next steps are. Talk about the logistics, where you're going to house things and how you're going to base the frequency of this team getting together. Now that you know how to run an effective kickoff meeting and you know when to do it and the full purpose behind it, please go to the link below, grab this. Oh my goodness. You need to ensure you do not make these mistakes. So check it out and grab it from the link below. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel, hit that like button and share it with all the professionals that you know. I am dying to hear from you if you've tried any of these techniques or what things that you do when you run your own kickoff meeting. Till the next video. See ya.