What to Include in Your Project Kickoff Presentation

What to Include in Your Project Kickoff Presentation
By Zenkara

I was recently asked about why project kickoffs are important – surely people could just read the Project Management Plan and Project Charter.

Nice in theory – rather more difficult in practice. It’s always better to get everyone in a room (physical or web-based) and make sure everyone understands the fundamental points of the project.

But what to include in a presentation?

• Name of the project
• Project manager

Scope

• Objectives
• Customers
• Expected results

Structure

• Team
• Sponsor
• Stakeholders
• Organizational structure

Schedule

• Approach
• Key phases
• Milestones
• Deadlines
• Key deliverables

Customer Engagement

• What will the customer do
• How will we interact with them?

Risks & Opportunities

• What could go wrong?
• What synergies or opportunities (cross/up-sell)

Budget

• How much money?
• How much effort?

Reporting and Meetings

• How will we report progress? (THIS IS CRITICAL)
• Do we need to meet regularly?
• How do we raise problems and issues? To who?

Other Project Matters

• What tools, etc do we have at our disposal
• What platforms/technologies are we using
• Is there a current architecture laid out?
• What gets stored where?
• Where are the project practices? On the wiki/intranet?

By keeping things simple and not creating 80 page presentations, you’ll be able to communicate a clear vision and use the info in future plans, reports, and presentations to the sponsor. It will also bring future team members up to speed much quicker.

Zenkara focuses on streamlining and deploying business processes and quality systems and accelerating decision making through OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) and metrics systems. Zenkara is located in Brisbane, Australia.