Russell:
Yeah. To make an agreement we need to have both lied on each side.
Dan:
Completely and I think the kick off meeting is a chance to meet the real person, to meet the real client.
Russell:
The dust is settling, the shadows are forming, as real people.
Dan:
Peek behind the curtain. What’s going on? That’s a very roundabout way of describing what is essentially a set of people sitting in a room together.
Russell:
It’s just people talking.
Dan:
It is. It’s like any other meeting. It happens right at the beginning and it’s all about, I suppose just making sure that everyone knows what they’re going to be doing in the project. From your experience, kick-off meetings, who should be in them? Whose there?
Russell:
Yeah so obviously we want to get all the stake holders involved. People who have been making decisions on the project and also if we can, you know, the people who are going to be doing the design and development work and actually like working on that project themselves just so there’s that personal connection between people when it comes to trading feedback and stuff. You obviously want to know the person that you’re speaking to and have that connection with them in the first place. I find it’s helpful anyway. You know, “Yeah.” I mean someone in the iron saying, “Do you really need that?”
Dan:
“Do you believe what we told you to win this work?”
Russell:
Yeah.
Dan:
Yeah, no. I agree. There’s two sides to it really. There is definitely the personal side, the actual making sure that the people who are going to work on the project from both sides are meeting. Making sure that there’s no gremlins as well. That actually, because a lot of things can slip through the net during that brief proposal and even down to the contract. There’s often dark corners of a project that no one’s spoken about yet. The kick-off meeting is a time to find them out. As people that run kick-off meetings I find that’s one of the things that we’ve got better and better at is working out how to find those dark corner.
By dark corner I mean the person that wrote the brief, for example, was in the marketing department and they’ve written this brief about how they want this incredible social media strategy and with a great new website but they haven’t spoken to anyone in their development or tech department, and actually the whole thing needs to be built in a certain technology that no one understands and there’s this big gotcha waiting for you.
The kick-off meeting’s about finding out that as early as possible. Because during, you don’t really want to ask those difficult questions when you’re trying to win the work because you might not know the answers or the client might not like the answer to the… being brutally honest. That’s going to damage your project.
The longer those things go unfound, they’re going to damage your project. Ultimately also can mean that you may have to totally reshape how the project runs.
Russell:
Yeah that’s ultimately true. Especially if you’re talking about, I mean, if you’re bringing in new people in that kick-off meeting who in the past haven’t been involved before they’re bringing their new ideas into the project and may expect that they can do that, which in turn could change the brief. It’s knowing what’s actually going to be brought forward into the project or not.
Dan:
It’s kind of digging under the surface of the project, finding out all those little bits of information that are useful to us because of our experience in running project. There’s not a whole lot of it that’s about the actual, what I find anyway, and not a whole lot of it is about the actual solution or the direction you’re going to take. It’s too early really, to say that to someone, or maybe I just don’t listen at that point.
Russell:
You’ve got your own assumption.
Dan:
Yeah, completely. I switch off for that bit and think, “Right I know who’s paying the bills and then I know that guy’s a problem. I’ll let the designers talk about the colours etc,…” I certainly think it’s really to, there’s no need to dig too deep into how you’re going to do stuff because there’s phases of the project that are built around that. The research phase or why framing or however the project plays out.
I don’t think, for me it’s definitely about making sure that everything you though you knew about the project is real and making sure that the client also understands your approach as an agency and just reconfirming that everyone’s happy essentially and sort of little social contracts of, it’s something to refer back to sometimes and say, “Remember when we were happy?” That’s what I just pose it as.
Russell:
“Remember when we were happy?”
Dan:
“Remember when we were happy in this project?”
Russell:
We used to laugh together and now there’s one week left to go…