Chapter 20
Starting Off Right
You’ve won the job. The celebrations are over; the contracts are being drawn up. Now it’s time to actually begin the work. After the high tension and adrenaline of the sales process, you may be tempted to feel that you have accomplished the hard stuff and that you can now work on autopilot. And while it is true that you are probably more effective if you relax, it is not true that you can just kick back. In this chapter, we will point out the three most common pitfalls of the kickoff stage, and offer a practical approach to getting off on the right foot.
How you start a project can have an outsized impact on the result of the project. Let’s do the math.
Ask yourself how your team’s ability to work together will determine the success of this project—both in effectiveness and efficiency. What is the impact in terms of meeting deadlines? Quality? Friction versus ease of working together? Recommendations and likelihood of repeat business?
Say you have a project with a $1 million budget that’s worth $2 million in value to the client organization. Conservatively, say the effectiveness of the team will impact both cost and value plus or minus 10 percent. Compare that to the cost of a well-run kickoff meeting. Suddenly the cost of kicking off right—including face-to-face with multiple stakeholders—pales in comparison to the relative upside/downside.
Whether you agree precisely with that order of magnitude, the point is that beginnings matter and should ...
