Plan a project kickoff
Turn a rough project idea into a structured kickoff plan: scope, phases, owners, risks, and the questions to settle first.
Yours to copy, change, and make your own.
Replace every [BRACKETED PLACEHOLDER] with your own material before you send it.
Help me plan the kickoff of a project. Project: [PROJECT DESCRIPTION] Deadline or target date: [DEADLINE] People available: [TEAM] Constraints: [CONSTRAINTS] Produce: 1. A one-paragraph scope statement, including what is explicitly out of scope. 2. Phases with rough durations working back from the deadline, flagging any phase that looks unrealistically tight. 3. A RACI-style list: for each major workstream, who is responsible and who must be consulted. 4. The ten biggest risks, each with a one-line mitigation. 5. The five questions we must answer before work starts, ranked by how expensive it is to change the answer later. Rules: - Be concrete. "Confirm data source access with IT by [date]" beats "engage stakeholders". - Challenge me: if the deadline, team, and scope do not add up, say so in the first line rather than producing a polite fiction. - Use British English.
- [PROJECT DESCRIPTION]
- What the project is and why it is happening, in two or three sentences.
- [DEADLINE]
- The target date and how fixed it really is.
- [TEAM]
- Who is available and roughly how much of their time.
- [CONSTRAINTS]
- Budget, systems, approvals, or anything else the plan must respect.
Where it shines, and where it falls over.
- Small and medium internal projects getting off the ground
- Structuring a kickoff workshop agenda
- Stress-testing a plan you have already sketched
- The "questions ranked by cost of changing the answer later" list is the highest-value output; put it at the top of the kickoff agenda.
- Paste the output into a second prompt: "You are a sceptical finance director. What is wrong with this plan?"
The model does not know your organisation's politics, budget cycle, or who is quietly opposed to the project, and those sink more projects than bad planning does. Treat the output as a straw man to react to in the kickoff meeting, not as the plan itself.
Duration estimates are the weakest section. The model has no idea how long things take in your organisation and will produce durations that look plausible for a generic company. Replace them with your own numbers, and take the "unrealistically tight" flags seriously; the model is more honest about impossible deadlines than most colleagues.
AI output is a first draft, not a finished product. You are responsible for whatever you send, publish, or decide with it.
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