As a project manager who’s about to start a project — you know that the first step is always the hardest.
Starting a project is no easy feat. You need to have an all-encompassing view of the entire project and understand what the final goal you’re trying to achieve is before you even begin. Otherwise, you won’t be prepared for potential risks and will no doubt be blindsided during the execution stage!
Sounds scary, right?
Not necessarily.
Knowing how to start a project is an essential skill, but there are 5 simple steps that make it easy to manage. Here’s exactly what experts suggest you should do.
Table of Contents
1. Define project goals and objectives
Ask yourself: “What does this project aim to accomplish? What goals are we trying to achieve?”
We spoke to Randi Mays, Project Development Manager at Oii.ai, who shared with us how she starts her projects:
“Every good PM I’m sure does this, but I start with defining the goals and objectives of the project. This is key for identifying stakeholders, understanding their needs, and setting clear expectations.”
But it’s not enough just to define goals — they have to be doable too.
So, make your objectives and goals S.M.A.R.T. — specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and time-related — to make them easier to accomplish.
2. Construct a project charter
Once you know the project goals, it’s time to construct a project charter.
A project charter is a short document that serves as an overview of your entire project. It is also what is given to stakeholders for evaluation and approval — which is necessary if you plan on bringing your project to life anytime soon.
Randi explains that after goals and objectives, she focuses on the project charter because experience has shown it provides stakeholders with valuable insights:
“I will develop what we like to call a project charter. What’s the project’s purpose? What objectives are we achieving? What’s the scope and high-level timeline and, of course, the budget?
For example, at Oii.ai, the stakeholders appreciated the project charter because it showed them the risks that were on our radar during the duration of the project and what the expectations were for the project.”
3. Create a project plan
Once the project charter is ready, it’s time to move from the project initiation phase to the planning phase and create a detailed project plan to help you complete the project:
- On time and
- Within budget.
The project plan is a set of all documents related to the project that you can refer to during the execution stage. It’s more elaborate than the project charter and explains how you’re going to achieve what was promised in the charter.
To ensure success, your project plan should include:
4. Assemble the project team
One of the most important steps is choosing the right people for your project. Choose wrong, and it doesn’t matter how great your initial idea is — your project will be an absolute disaster.
When selecting team members, consider who has the expertise you need for that particular project. When you have the right people on the right tasks, you can be sure that everything will be done on time and with minimal chances of mistakes.
That said, don’t forget to check the availability of those employees as well. They should be able to dedicate themselves to your project without being overbooked. Otherwise, they will be distracted with other work, and your project will suffer.
Randi shares how she assembles the team for a project:
“Working at Oii.ai, we have a great team, small but mighty, and each team member has a unique skill, so it’s important to see if it’s required in the project and when their skill set will be needed. From there, I am able to then assign roles and responsibilities and establish communication channels. Structure raises the chances of project success and on-time completion.”
The President and Founder at Projects by Molly, LLC, Molly Beran, emphasizes the importance of consulting with the team members to see if more people need to be included:
“Many times, sponsors or higher-level leaders may not know all of the individuals and teams required to get things done, but the next level down in the organization will have more detailed insights as to who needs to be involved to do which specific tasks. I always ask the team doing the work whether anyone else needs to be included so that we have everyone present for required meetings.”
5. Organize a project kickoff meeting
Once everything is set, it’s time for a project kickoff meeting — the first meeting with the team members, clients, and other project stakeholders before the work on the project begins.
This is the final stage of a project setup. Its purpose? To ensure everyone is on the same page before the execution of the project starts.
When we spoke to Bryan Berthot, Project Manager, Scrum Master, and Doctoral Candidate at the University of South Florida, he explained that you should ideally conduct 2 kickoff meetings — internal and external.
The internal kickoff meeting is, as the name suggests, for internal members of the team only and serves to review everything before meeting with the client:
“The internal kickoff meeting is for the project manager to meet all internal subject-matter experts and stakeholders. Any existing project documents may be reviewed as necessary, including the project charter.
A major reality check occurs here as the team subject-matter experts perform discovery on the scope of work and the bid. The team should come out of this meeting with a unified front to present to the client. If any adjustments need to be made, this is the time — before meeting with the client.”
After the internal meeting, you are ready to organize an external kickoff meeting with the client to help both sides understand what is expected of them:
“After the internal team meets, the next stage is to meet with the customer. In particular, the PM highlights the project scope and reviews the critical path and any customer expectations. If the customer has work items to do, the PM emphasizes these timelines to avoid any delays. Much like the internal kickoff meeting, the outcome of this initial meeting with the customer is to achieve shared expectations about the project.”
Need more? Here’s a few extra tips on how to introduce a project
By now, you should be feeling more confident about starting that new project of yours. But wait — our experts have a few more tips that should help make launching a project a total breeze.
Randi Mays highlights the project initiation process as the most important part of the project life cycle because here you get to know the client:
“Spend ample time in the initial phases to understand the client’s specific challenges and goals, and their needs and wants. This sets a solid foundation right from the get-go.”
Molly Beran, on the other hand, points out how crucial team communication is. She encourages PMs to ask as many questions as needed since they aren’t experts on the subject matter like other team members, but have a more organizational role:
“Don’t be afraid to ask questions about tasks that are unclear or unintuitive to you — the SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) are the ones who should know more about what is going to be done. As a project manager, you want to be focused on helping them communicate the work and track the work, not on actually doing the work yourself.”
How to set up a project effortlessly with Plaky
Stop despairing about your projects not going smoothly — when all it takes is the right project management software.
You can organize all the steps within the development of a new project in Plaky — an easy-to-use, but rather robust, project management tool.
Serving as a single point of reference for your project, Plaky keeps all crucial information in one place. All your tasks are neatly organized in an unlimited number of boards and spaces. So, you won’t waste time looking for information and wondering where something is written or mentioned — it’s all easily accessible.
And with customizable fields, you can include everything you need — from project status and priority to timelines, descriptions, and assignees. This helps you know exactly:
- Where your project stands and how close to success (or failure!) you are,
- What your team is currently working on,
- What each task entails and how your team should approach them,
- How busy (or not) each team member is,
- Which tasks to do first so that your project doesn’t sink, and more.
Now, with the Plaky template center at your disposal, you won’t have to waste time starting every new project from scratch. Just select the template you need, and you’re ready to go — Plaky offers templates for a variety of industries and types of projects.
That said, you can also take a board you’ve created and save it as a template to use in the future.
This is especially useful if you have many similar projects and want to save time and resources in the planning stage. And it certainly helps that all templates are fully customizable — so you can easily adjust them to fit any project.
All Plaky boards are also available in 3 views:
- Table — for spreadsheet lovers,
- Kanban — for Agile teams, and
- Gantt — for visual thinkers.
And yes — you can create as many board views as you want. Better yet, you can personalize them using filter and sort options, conditional coloring, and other customization options — and keep important information readily available at all times.
Jumpstart your projects in Plaky! Create an account today and start with a 14-day free trial that gives you access to all of Plaky’s features.
Need more support for your projects? Give CAKE.com’s Bundle a go for only $12.99 and get access to Enterprise features of all 3 of our products:
- Clockify — a powerful time-tracking tool,
- Pumble — a reliable business messaging app, and
- Plaky — a user-friendly, no-nonsense project management tool.
