Kick-off Meetings

Mobilisation fails quietly: a data owner who never understood the timeline, an architect briefed on a different scope, a steering member expecting a design project. Kick-off meetings are where the project definition, governance and method plan stop being documents and become shared operating reality. Done properly, they surface misalignment while it costs a conversation. Skipped or ceremonial, the misalignment surfaces in Diagnose, where it costs weeks.

• At the close of Discover mobilisation, once definition, governance and data inventory exist
• Separately per audience: leadership team, project team, community group, external advisors
• Again at phase transitions when new parties join (architects at Develop, contractors at Deliver)

• Session-specific: leadership team; workplace project team and data owners; community group; external advisors (strategist, architect, change, technology)
• The sponsor opens each session personally — delegated openings signal delegated priority

• Project definition document and scope statement
• Governance charter and decision-rights register
• Master timeline and method plan
• Evidence inventory and data-request status

1. Run separate, audience-calibrated sessions — a single all-hands kick-off aligns nobody.
2. In each session: the sponsor states the business trigger and open decision in their own words; the strategist walks the method plan phase by phase; roles and decision rights are confirmed person by person.
3. Walk the timeline against fixed events and name the critical dependencies (data delivery, participant availability, decision dates).
4. Confirm communication protocols: what is communicated to the wider organisation, when, by whom — and what is not yet communicated.
5. Explicitly test understanding: ask each party to state their role and next contribution. Misalignment surfaces immediately.
6. Record commitments and circulate a single mobilisation note per session within 48 hours.

• Participants who describe the project as a design or move project — the definition has not landed
• Silent disagreement: nodding in session, objections by email afterwards
• Data owners hearing their delivery dates for the first time
• External advisors with scope assumptions from their own proposals rather than the project definition
• Questions about outcomes ('will we lose our desks?') — capture for change communication, do not improvise answers

• Mobilisation notes per audience with confirmed commitments
• Updated risk and dependency register
• Agreed communication protocol for the wider organisation
• Confirmed method plan and timeline

The confirmed commitments activate the Data Requests delivery schedule and the interview programme in Diagnose. The communication protocol governs what the organisation hears throughout — protecting Diagnose methods from response bias caused by premature messaging about outcomes.

Detecting polite alignment that masks disagreement is a facilitation skill. Deciding what the wider organisation should hear at this stage — enough to prevent rumour, not enough to bias research — is a judgement call with no formula.

• One generic kick-off for all audiences
• Presenting the methodology without testing whether roles were understood
• Letting the session drift into premature solution debate ('so, hot-desking?')
• No written mobilisation note, so commitments evaporate
• Announcing the project to the whole organisation before the research communication protocol exists

A logistics firm ran four calibrated kick-offs. In the project-team session, the HR data owner revealed the requested workforce projection did not exist in the assumed format — a three-week dependency caught on day one instead of mid-Diagnose. In the leadership session, one member described the project as 'the office refurb', prompting the sponsor to restate the portfolio decision. Both corrections cost thirty minutes.