Usually, an Erasmus+ kick-off meeting takes place after the statement of work or project poster has been finalised and all parties involved are ready to go. Your Erasmus+ kick-off is an opportunity to orient the team to the work at hand, decide how everyone will work together, and establish common project goals and check-ins.
Get to Grips with the Nuts and Bolts of Your Erasmus+ Project
An Erasmus+ project kick-off presentation's objective is to introduce the team, understand the project background, comprehend what success looks like, understand what has to be done, and agree on how to operate successfully together. It's an opportunity to step-up and make sure that the team and client are both on the same page. That’s obviously a lot of information to pass on to the Erasmus+ project team! So how can you make sure that everyone walks out of the kick-off meeting with all that knowledge intact?
While there will be frequent meetings throughout your project, the Erasmus+ kick-off meeting is unique in that it involves the entire project team. It’s unlikely that everyone will be assembled at the same time and place again. This is why having the right project management focus is so important.
How to Run Your Kick-Off Meeting Successfully
Here are a few pointers to make sure you run your project kick-off meeting successfully:
- Prepare: You thoroughly researched and documented the Erasmus+ project during the initiation phase in order to sell it to your stakeholders, now you have to do the same to the project team.
- Introduce Yourself and the Team: This is the first time the entire Erasmus+ project team has been assembled, so take some time to let everyone introduce themselves.
- Define the Project: Make sure the team is clear on what the purpose of the Erasmus+ project is and how the project mission statement relates to the larger company’s goals and objectives.
- Hand Out the Erasmus+ Project Plan: The project plan should be documented in a handout and distributed during the kick-off meeting. Within the plan, you need to include the budget timeline. Go through the project plan in detail together and make sure everyone understands the top-line information, such as the project timeline, key milestones and deliverables.
- Define Erasmus+ Project Scope: Make sure the team knows the project scope and key project information. This helps avoid any problems by managing the team’s expectations.
- Share Roles and Responsibilities: If the team already has a history of working together, this step might not be as important, but it’s crucial for new teams to understand their relationships with one another.
- Explain the Central Source of Truth: Have a central source of truth for the team to know the status of the Erasmus+ project. That is, the team needs a shared place with real-time data, so everyone is always clear on the project’s status and their own status too.
- Ask Questions, Next Steps and To-Do Lists: Before wrapping up, open the floor to any questions to make sure everyone is clear on what has been shared at the kick-off meeting. Take some time to explain what will happen next, including any post-kick-off meeting to-do lists for the team. Our free “Action Items” template can help.