Project kick-off: order instead of sticky-note chaos
On day one of a project the wall is covered in sticky notes. It shows how much was thought — not what applies. Why a project starts better with a list than with a wall.
Day one of a project has a familiar picture: a room, a wall, hundreds of sticky notes. Yellow for requirements, pink for risks, blue for open questions. After three hours the wall is full, and everyone feels they have achieved a lot.
The wall shows how much was thought. It does not show what applies. The notes carry memories and impressions — from the contract, from the specification, from a conversation three weeks ago. Where a statement comes from is written on none of them. Two notes that contradict each other hang peacefully side by side as long as nobody happens to read them together. And whatever does not make it onto the wall does not exist for the project.
The problem is not the method. A workshop is good at bringing knowledge into a room. It is bad at checking documents against each other. Contract, specification, policies and standards are too long, too many and too different to lay side by side in one's head — and it is exactly in between them that the contradictions arise that slow a project down later.
With Aigis the start begins one step earlier. The process:
- The documents go into a project in Aigis: contracts, specifications, policies, expectations.
- Aigis extracts the requirements from every document and holds each one against every other.
- In less than two hours the list is ready: contradictions with both citations, obligations without an owner, open questions as ready-worded queries, decisions with the role that has to make them.
- The kick-off works through this list. The wall may stay — for what it is good at: ideas.
The difference shows on day one. Instead of "there was something in the contract", the sentence lies on the table with document and section. Instead of twenty opinions there is a short list of open points, and every point carries a name. Whoever misses the kick-off reads up on what applies instead of reconstructing the workshop from photos of the wall.
And it shows later. If a requirement changes, the old result counts as outdated until it has been checked again. A wall full of notes does not notice that one of them is no longer true.
What Aigis does not do: decide. It recommends no option. Which side of a contradiction applies is decided by the people responsible for it — but they decide on the right questions, with the citation in front of them.
A project does not begin with the fullest wall, but with the clearest view of what matters.