Project Meetings
The Project Kickoff meeting marks the formal launch of the project. It’s a high-level introduction of the project team, stakeholders, and timeline.
Attendees:
All project team members (client and implementer)
Meeting Purpose:
To align everyone on the project goals, governance structure, high-level milestones, and roles & responsibilities
Timing:
Plan Stage
Change Management Value-Add
Why This Matters for Change Management:
Change Management presence helps to establish your role and credibility with the project team
It’s your chance to introduce Change Management as a core workstream, setting the expectation that people-readiness is just as important as system-readiness.
Questions to Ask Yourself
Expand each section below:
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Who are the executive sponsors and what are their priorities?
What previous change initiatives have impacted these same groups?
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Begin identifying key stakeholders and impacted groups
Who seems the most excited? Who is the most quiet?
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Who are the decision makers?
Which tools will be used for project artifacts and reporting?
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What business outcomes are we trying to achieve with this implementation?
Understand project success metrics to align change metrics
Preparing for the Meeting
In addition to being a participant in the Project Kickoff meeting, you should also prepare for the meeting as a presenter.
Audiocast (5:15)
Listen to learn the 4 critical things you’ll want to accomplish during this meeting
Key Points
Use the Project Kickoff meeting to accomplish these 4 things:
1. Establish yourself as a credible, strategic partner
Make a strong first impression and begin positioning yourself as a trusted advisor. Practice your delivery if necessary to ensure you communicate with confidence and clarity.
Remember that presence matters more than process. People will remember how you showed up more than what was on your slides.
This is also your chance to establish visibility for change management as an integral workstream, not something tangential to the project.
2. Set expectations about the scope and pace of change management activities
Many people think of change management as just communications and training. While those are important components, our work encompasses much more.
Our scope includes the user experience, end user support and documentation, and identifying how Workday will fit into the flow of work to drive user adoption.
Our Strategic Work
Focuses on building understanding and desire to anchor the change. This includes creating strategies and plans.
Our Tactical Work
Involves executing strategic plans and building awareness and understanding of what will happen at go-live and what each person needs to do to be ready.
3. Get buy-in that the entire project team are members of the extended change management team
Explain that the change management workstream operates in three tiers:
Core Team includes change leads, communications team, training team, project manager, and project sponsor.
Change Champions are representatives from across the organization who act as ambassadors for the project. They serve as the workstream's eyes and ears on the ground.
Extended Change Team encompasses the entire project team and other stakeholders who support end users across the organization.
Set clear expectations that as members of the extended team, they will have change management responsibilities including providing SME input and insight about stakeholder sentiment and change impacts, reviewing and approving end user deliverables, and potentially delivering training to end users or their teams.
Collaborate with the project manager before the meeting to ensure change management tasks are included in the roles and responsibilities for functional and workstream leads. This reinforces the expectation that everyone shares responsibility for driving user adoption, not just the change management workstream.
4. Set the tone for how you'll operate throughout the project
Be respectful of everyone's time by leveraging existing meetings whenever possible (such as functional team meetings), though you may also need to schedule one-on-one SME interviews.
If you plan to use AI tools to increase effectiveness, emphasize the importance of keeping project artifacts updated. AI-powered change management works best when information is readily available and current.
The more change management can leverage existing project artifacts, the fewer demands will be placed on SMEs' time. This means less repetition and one less meeting on everyone's calendar.