5 ideas for your project kick-off

Introduction

Design project kickoffs can be a lot of fun, and they're a great way to get everyone on the same page. In this article, we've shared a few ideas to help get your creative juices flowing and set the tone for productive collaboration. We hope you find these tips helpful and that your next design project kickoff is a smashing success!

What is a project kick-off

A great way to start a new project is to gather all of the stakeholders and team members together for a workshop session. When you think of a workshop session perhaps you see a bunch of people gathered in front of a whiteboard with a bunch of post-it notes and a bowl of candy on the table. This is understandable since it was quite a common scene before the pandemic. But since the pandemic hit the rules for working changed drastically as everyone switched the office to their home and with that follow a quick rise of tools for remote collaboration.

Pros and cons of doing remote workshops

The classic idea of a workshop is a bunch of people gathering in a meeting room filled with colorful post-its and a bowl of candy and a facilitator would ask prompts people to go nuts with ideas all over the whiteboard. This is of course a fun and engaging activity that can help to build team spirit and nurture collaboration. But the downside of this is that it's hard to capture all of the ideas shared when the session is over. Taking a picture with your phone of a cluttered whiteboard is a mess to revisit in a couple of weeks and so the ideas that were discussed either have to be distilled afterward by the facilitator, which would take lots of time and leave room for interpretations and misunderstandings of the original concept.

Enter 2020 and the rise of tools like Miro, an excellent way to replace the physical whiteboard with a digital one, all of the people in the meeting room are now replaced by a colorful little cursor where everyone can see each other, comment and interact in real time, everything that you can find on the internet can be copied and pasted in no time and all of the thoughts and ideas are save on the link for your to revisit together anytime you want.

Setting up a remote workshop

Here are a couple of ideas to include in your project kick-off workshop.

User manual

Get each participant to fill in a user manual of themselves answering questions to help others understand how they think and act and how to best collaborate with them. Examples of questions to go into the user manual can be:

1. One thing that people often misunderstand about me.
2. I feel the most valued when…
3. I hate it when people…
4. The best way to contact me is….
5. Please don't disturb me during these times….

Hopes & Fears

Set a timer for 5 minutes and have all of the participants write down on post all of their hopes and fears of the project. What would the dream outcome look like and what pitfalls do we need to look out for?

Inspiration sharing

It's likely that everyone already has a couple of ideas and inspirations going into the project,

Tell everyone to bring 3 sources of inspiration going into the session, and take turns going around the group sharing why they brought this inspiration with them.

Stakeholder mapping

Every design project big or small requires research to be done. If you are not doing research then all of the things you produce are simply guesswork! Failing to do proper research increases the risk if you spend a lot of time and money solving the wrong thing! Research can be done in many ways and a great way to gather information is through interviews. A good kickoff place would be with the internal stakeholders so during the kickoff session help the designer to map out which stakeholders to talk to and if possible their contact information.

Bonus: Sending out the invitations

Once you’ve finished planning the workshop it's time to send out the invitations. Be clear in your invitations about what the participants can expect from the session and what you expect from them. A helpful artwork to structure the invitation around is IDOARRT. Which stands for

Intention - What is your intention with the workshop

Desired outcome - What do you wish to have accomplished at the end

Agenda - Share an overview, and make sure to Include breaks.

Roles - What responsibilities are there i.e. facilitator or notetaker Rules - i.e. no phones, build on each other's ideas, etc.

Time - How long will the meeting be

Conclusion

Design project kickoffs can be a lot of fun, and they're a great way to get everyone on the same page. In this article, we've shared a few ideas to help get your creative juices flowing and set the tone for productive collaboration. We hope you find these tips helpful and that your next design project kickoff is a smashing success!