By Nick Butler
Tags: Agile
Get an example one-day Agile project kick-off agenda, learn what each activity achieves and get tips for facilitating your discovery workshop.
Get the Agile Project Kick-off Kit as a handy 39-page PDF. Based on this blog post series, it’s been revised and expanded, giving you the tools you need to get your project off to a successful start.
Speed without compromise is our motto at Boost. With that in mind, this agenda for a one-day Agile project kick-off workshop sets you up to start building your product the very next day.
As we discussed in our introduction to the Agile project kick-off, this is just one possible agenda, a fairly typical one here at Boost. You can find ideas for other kick-off activities in Jonathan Rasmussen’s project inception deck.
You’ll need the right people in the room: the Product Owner, stakeholders who understand the customers (and ideally some actual customers), the team who’ll build the product and the facilitator. If everyone’s open and eager to contribute, the activities below combine to create a high-performing unit with a common understanding of your product and priorities.
Here’s a brief description of each activity on the project kick-off agenda and what it contributes to the kick-off, along with a rough estimate of the timebox (the time set aside for the activity).
45 minutes
The Product Owner outlines how the product will help your customers and achieve the strategic goals of your organisation.
Then the team asks any questions they have and the conversation begins, uniting the team behind a common vision of the product and its purpose.
45 minutes
Imagine you’ve released your product into the wild. Now it’s time to draft a press release that trumpets your success.
This is a chance for the whole team to paint a shared picture of what success looks like. From there you can work backwards to the product that will deliver that success.
(Take a break)
30 minutes
Distil your product’s unique selling point in the marketplace and spin it into a story you can tell in the time it takes to get to your floor.
This helps the team position the product in the market and promote it to stakeholders. It also gives you an easy answer when people at parties ask you what you’re working on.
20 minutes
There is often a trade-off between the different measures of a project’s success (time, budget, scope, quality etc). Success Sliders let you juggle the different factors to come up with agreed priorities.
45 minutes
Sketch out a range of representative users, then decide which is the highest priority. Give them a name and describe their background, along with how and why they’ll use the product.
Pragmatic Personas are a speedy way for a team to nail down who the product is for. Drafting these personas helps make your customers real, and doing it collaboratively creates a common understanding.
(Take a break)
90 minutes
Brainstorm every task that users will want to complete using the product from their first touch to the point they leave. Then organise these tasks into the order they’ll complete them in, and group them into wider goals or activities.
It’s easy to miss the forest for the trees, especially with big projects. Breaking work into manageable chunks can make it less coherent. Story mapping pulls it together into an integrated whole. And it can also highlight the set of tasks or features that hang together as a MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
30 minutes
Following on from Story Mapping, decide as a group on the priority of the User Stories. What are the Musts, Shoulds and Coulds (MoSCoW) for our personas?
This instils in the team the ruthless focus on what delivers the most value, most quickly.
(Take a break)
90 minutes
User Stories describe a feature of the product from the customer’s point of view. At Boost we use them for most of our work because they’re a great way of expressing the benefits of a project and providing a conversation centre until they have been completed.
By fleshing out some or all of your Musts you’ll learn the art of writing an effective User Story, and the conversation that is crucial to the process.
20 minutes
Decide and document how you’re going to work together.
The idea behind the Team Charter is that you’re more likely to get a great team when the team itself sets the ground rules.
If you’re based in New Zealand, Boost can plan and facilitate your workshop for you. It’s a great way to get clear what you want to achieve, how long this will take and how much it will cost.
Learn how the project discovery experts can take the hassle out of building your business case and getting your project up and running.
How we can help you plan, size and cost your project
This post is part of a series covering the tools and templates you can use for a Project Kick-off.
Get the Agile Project Kick-off Kit as a handy 39-page PDF. Based on this blog post series, it’s been revised and expanded, giving you the tools you need to get your project off to a successful start.
Watch The Board episodes on Project Kick-offs and Product Discovery Workshops
Read about the Project-Kickoff for our Scrummaker project
In New Zealand and keen to train with the team who put together the Kick-off kit? Learn more about our Agile training:
Agile Professional Foundation certification, Wellington, NZ – two-day ICAgile course
Introduction to Agile methodology, Wellington, NZ – free two-hour workshop
Agile Accelerator team assessment – Agile review and action plan
