How to get the right persons invited in a Kickoff meeting?

• The_Cat
• January 29, 2022
• Project management
• 0
• 497

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1. Get your objectives clear

As presented within the part 1to be found here the kickoff meeting requires to reach the validation of the following subjects:

1. Organizational structure including main roles and responsibilities
2. Governance structure
3. Overall schedule
4. Main challenges/risks

Indeed, the main scope of this meeting is to receive a validation for the topics mentioned above nonetheless there are two subsidiaries targets that need also to be carefully addressed:

1. to ensure that the information is reaching properly the audience
2. to collect feedback

On exactly this frame a project manager needs to build his understanding of the persons that need to be invited in the meeting as well as the roles that he expects those people to play during the meeting.

2. Invite 90% of participants with the power to validate

The following questions are, in my view, a good start to define who you need to invite (considering the topics above):

1. Who’s the decision will be considered/respected by my entire organization when it comes to allocating resources for my project
2. Who has something to lose or to gain out of this project?
3. Who needs the deliverables of this project?
4. Who believes that this project is mandatory?
5. Who can block my project?
6. Who can help me on specific topics of the project?
7. Who needs to know of this project considering legal implications?

I strongly suggest running those questions at least two times, until you feel that there is nobody else you’re missing.

You can also use as a checkpoint one of your peers, making together this exercise might bring some new names as well as roles.

Finally… you have a list of names; next step is to define what is expected of each of the person?

Enrich your list by adding 2 more columns with the Position in organization and Role in the meeting

You may also find the template for below

3. Quality not quantity

The probability of achieving the validation is indirectly proportional to the number of participants.

My lesson learned was that the higher is the number of participants in the meeting that only participate for information the lower are the chances to get the validation.

The reason behind this fact is that each of the participants feel the need to participate. …obviously.

Some participants take their role very seriously and, they start asking questions, making remarks with little value, … ending up in consuming the allocated time of the meeting.

The worst-case scenario that you can have in kickoff meeting is to receive questions from participants without the power of decisions but with the “power” of deviating you from the meeting objective

In this scenarios you will realize that the time is up and you have not received the validation. Even worst, now you have some “open points” to address resulted from the discussion developed during the meeting.

Your kickoff meeting was transformed in an ideas exchange meeting/debate/analysis.

Remember that the question should come mainly from the participants that at the end will be also able to validate.

By using the provided template and filling in table, you will know:

1. Persons that should receive an information mail (avoiding to increase the number present in the meeting)
2. Persons that really need to participate having an added value as validation.

The next step is to send the invitation and prepare the participants to play their part well… but this will be covered in the next part