Before the kickoff: what you inherit from the sale

An implementation does not begin at the kickoff meeting. It begins at a gap.

Between you and the blank page sit signed documents, verbal promises, and expectations formed in a presentation six months ago. Start from the blank page and you end up renegotiating what was sold after it became a contract, which is the worst possible moment to negotiate.

This station is about the fortnight before kickoff, the cheapest fortnight in the entire project. A risk found there costs a sentence; the same risk six months later costs a change request.

Read the deal as a project document

Five documents, read in order, all of them available before day one.

Document	What you are looking for
The contract	The written scope, the duration, the payments, and what suspends them
The statement of work	What is included by name, and what is excluded by name
The presentation	What the customer saw and believed — usually wider than the contract
The requirements list	What the customer said they needed, and at what level of detail
Sales correspondence	Written promises outside the contract

The third one is the danger. The customer does not remember a contract clause; they remember the screen. Everything shown and not explicitly excluded will be asked for at design.

So build a two-column table: what was promised, and what is actually included. The difference between the columns is your risk list, ready before you start.

Six questions for the sales team

Sit with whoever sold it, before kickoff, and ask six questions. Write down the answers.

1. Who was in the room at the decision, and who objected? The objector has not disappeared; they will surface at design.
2. What did you promise and not write down? — asked without blame, because the point is knowledge rather than accountability.
3. What did we discount, and in exchange for what? A discount given for speed becomes pressure on your schedule.
4. What did the customer expect of their own people’s time? That question exposes the largest risk in any implementation.
5. Did the customer see a tailored demo or a standard one? A tailored one is an implicit promise of an environment that does not exist.
6. What did the customer say that we did not take seriously? — usually the real obstacle.

Question four matters most. Most projects slip because the customer’s staff were never freed up, and that constraint is asked about before kickoff rather than in month three. See why ERP projects fail — four of its seven reasons are management decisions settled at this stage.

The assumptions register

The most useful document in the entire project, the cheapest, and the most neglected.

It is a list of what you are treating as true and have not proved, written in week one and approved by the customer.

Assumption	If it is wrong	Owner	Verify by
Item data is clean and free of duplicates	3 weeks’ delay	Customer	Week 2
Key users are 50% available	A full replan	Customer	Week 1
The legacy payroll exports in a readable format	An integration project	Joint	Week 4
No customisation in the finance cycle	6 weeks	Customer	Week 6

The register’s value is not the prediction. It is the signature. An assumption written and approved and then disproved becomes a change request without argument; an assumption left in your head becomes an accusation of poor judgement.

And every line needs a verification date, not “we’ll review it later”.

The kickoff meeting itself

Most kickoff meetings go on introductions and slides about the vendor’s methodology. That wastes the two most important hours on the project.

An agenda that works, in this order.

Item	Time	Output
Why this project — said by the sponsor, not you	10 min	The room hears it from whoever decided
Scope: what is in and what is out, by name	20 min	No more “does this include…”
The team: who, and for what share of their time	20 min	Relief declared in public
The decision structure and its deadlines	15 min	Everybody knows who decides what
The assumptions register	30 min	Read line by line and approved
The five milestones and their dates	15 min	A public commitment

The third item is where you do not soften. Announcing that somebody will give sixteen hours a week in front of their manager and the sponsor is ten times stronger than an agreement in a corridor.

And the sponsor says the first item. A project whose purpose is explained by the project manager is the vendor’s project in the room’s mind; one explained by the decision maker is theirs.

What you actually do in this station

• Read all five documents in full before the first meeting. In full, not in summary.
• Build the “promised” against “included” table, and put it to the sales team to confirm.
• Sit with the seller with the six questions and write the answers into a document that is kept.
• Write the assumptions register with at least ten lines, each with an owner and a date.
• Put it to the customer’s sponsor and get written approval before kickoff.

The three commonest mistakes

One: starting from a blank page. What was sold gets renegotiated mid-project.

Two: avoiding the question about the customer’s time. The constraint is discovered in month three with no remedy.

Three: assumptions in your head rather than in a document. Every one that proves wrong becomes an argument about blame.

The acceptance test for this station

1. Show the “promised” against “included” table and its three largest gaps.
2. Show the six answers in writing.
3. Show the assumptions register with an owner and a date per line.
4. Name the riskiest assumption and your plan if it is wrong.
5. Name who approved the register and when.

What comes next

You know what you inherited. The next station builds the machine that runs it: the charter and governance — who decides what, in which meeting, and within how many days.