Program Kick off with a Bank

We had a large Program to start delivering a multi-month project for a bank. I was brought in to help facilitate a kickoff. I split the kickoff into key areas:

• Icebreaker
• Context & vision
• Architecture
• Key Milestones
• Premortem
• What does a great team look like
• How we deliver together
• Team Agreements
• Key ceremonies
• Immediate Priorities

Upon delivering the remote workshop I had massively underestimated the time it would take to prepare the individuals for each section. Participants arrived late, the flow between events wasn’t smooth - important questions were asked. During the presentation I cut scope as follows:

• Icebreaker (which overran due to poor estimation and a feeling I couldn’t force the timebox once the event had started)
• Context & vision (Which overran due to questions)
• Architecture (Which overran due to questions)
• Key Milestones (Which overran due to the presenter not being prepared to hit the timebox)
• How we deliver together (Which was condensed to be a tell don’t ask, and wasn’t as involved as originally intended)
• Premortem (which was perfect in terms of timings - identified the key risks being around documentation and knowledge sharing)
• What does a great team look like - which was altered on the fly to become “What does a great team do to address documentation and knowledge sharing)
• Key events (which was just a bullet list of what needs to be arranged for next time)

Everything else was cut from the scope on the fly.

I felt disappointed at the end of the event that I had clearly underestimated the amount of work I had committed to. I was also disappointed that key things I had agreed to were not in the final workshop.

Kelly’s coaching

I received some coaching from Kelly. It was a masterclass in coaching where I spotted she never gave me opinions. She asked direct and powerful questions..

• “How do you feel it went?” - Rather than stating her opinion she deliberately asked for mine. This allowed us to explore my impression. It’s more genuine.
• “What was the best outcome?” - This was a great way to highlight the positive. As a believer in NLP, I was very careful not to mention negatives because I know the power in dialing up the good.
• “What would you have done better if you could run it again?” - This was a great way to focus on the negatives in a positive way. Yes it identifies the critical things, but focuses on the things I learned.
• “What was the effect on doing xxx in the way you did?” - To deep dive on something I may have missed, Kelly would focus the conversation on an area without judging. It allowed me to explore my interpretation.

It was clear from the conversation that I rushed the presentation, but Kelly helped me protect myself from being overly critical on myself. She helped me explore how I dealt with an emerging situation of being unable to stick to the time-boxes and guided me on the actions I took and explored the consequences they had.

Key Learnings

Be wary of leaders who use closed language

Example was when a Product person closed discussion around putting risks on a 2x2 grid (risk vs likelihood). A better solution would have been to use dot voting to ensure group think not HIPPo thinking. I allowed myself this misgiving by having run successful sessions with grid movements in the past, but acknowledge the reason that worked before was because of well gelled teams. This was a brand new teams.

Reduce scope not quality

My advice was a 2 day workshop. This got reduced down to 3 hours 30 minutes, and then a further reduced to 3 hours when the meeting was booked. As a result I found myself condensing the various workshop section lengths rather than cutting scope. This was a gross misgiving. You can’t shoehorn things into smaller gaps, they need to grow to accommodate all the room.

Focus on the value

With time going over, I reduced quality. Kelly observed that I had a few stakeholders to please, and as a result I was trying to deliver too many things. Example:

• Stakeholder 1: I want people to gel as a team.
• Stakeholder 2: I want to start things off with psychological safety being baked in
• Stakeholder 3: I want to ensure people understand the vision
• Stakeholder 4: I want to know what the concerns are of the people working on the project
• Stakeholder 5: I want to have an awareness and group consensus on the immediate priorities
• Stakeholder 6: I want to arrange the key events and ceremonies for the teams

As a result it’s hard to know what is priority. I should have made this list transparent and showed there were competing priorities and ordered the items on the agenda in terms of the highest priority to lowest. Rather than reducing hte time-boxes, I could then remove items from the end that wouldn’t fit.