How-To Kick-off a project

The kickoff meeting is such a critical moment in a project; an opportunity to establish common goals and purpose in completing the work.

Goal of a kickoff meeting

• Get a formal GO for the project before it starts or establish what needs to be fixed before starting the project
• Give a starting date to the project
• Make sure the key stakeholders are up on the project and its requirements (e.g people and/or hardware)

Development should not be done before the kick-off to ensure the design and architecture are agreed-upon by all stakeholders first.

In which cases should you plan a kick-off?

A formal kick-off meeting must be set up if at least one of the following conditions is met:

• 3+ developers are going to work on the project for at least 2 sprints
• The project has an impact on shared resources and on the performance of a application
• The rollout or rollback of the project does not follow the usual process
• The project adds a new item to the company stack
• The project involves the creation of a new service, application or tool
• The project will be hosted on machines with a new kind of configuration
• The project adds or modifies cookies, or modifies URLs

This list is not limited to those items.

How to prepare a kick-off?

No later than 1 week before the kick-off (and thus, before starting any development on the topic): send the kick-off invitation with

• a quick summary of the project
• the link to the draft page if ready
• Ensure all dependencies (including hosting infrastructure requirements, external resources) are explicitly expressed and will be delivered in time for the project
• Make sure design has been discussed offline with impacted teams and architects and NOT during the kick-off meeting which should be very short. 15 minutes maximum.
• The kick-off meeting is not an architecture-review or brainstorm meeting. Failure to prepare well for the kick-off will result in your project being delayed unnecessarily, since you’ll need to do another kick-off once the above aspects have been clarified.
• Take into account feedback and if there is any conflict, the appropriate department’s manager should decide, at the worst during the kick-off meeting (feel free to postpone it if we need more time for the decision)

What is the Kick-off template?

Here is an example of Kick-off Template with main items:

Background / Functional goals / Success factors

Explain the background of the project. Expose the goals of the project by bullet points. The project is a success if XXXXX

Non Goals

Expose the non goals of the project by bullet points.

Design

Explain the design of the project

Considered Alternatives

List considered alternatives during the project

Timeline / Roadmap

Target is to have everything rolled out in production by the end of QX 20XX.

Risks

Business risks, tech risk and dependencies.

Who?

• Kick-off is organized and is led by the owner of the project
• Attendees: tech and dev lead, product “owner” and manager
• People who have commented on the design doc

How?

• Reminder on the background and goals
• Design overview
• Dig into specificity
• Milestones/schedule
• Have a support (slides or page) to have something to show
• Questions

After the meeting, a summary of the main points raised during the meeting must be sent to all invitees, whether or not they could attend the meeting. This includes, but is not limited to:

• GO for the project (or part of it). If things need to be resolved before starting the project, another kick-off should be scheduled once all the dependencies/approaches have been clarified.
• Questions raised during the meeting that require further investigation
• Questions raised during the meeting that are out of scope but require further action
• R&D-wide impacts agreed upon during the meeting (e.g.: architecture decisions)
• The documentation is updated with the points above, as well as the documentation’s status (Draft / In Review / Final)

Summary
Depending on the size of the project, the visibility, its length, duration and probably a few other variables, this list may be longer or shorter. We’d love to hear if you’ve got any thoughts on kickoff meetings. Please share your thoughts and discuss.