A Strategic Checklist for Anchoring a New Project or Startup
Kicking off a new project can be messy.
Maybe you have been appointed to run a new initiative or organization. You’re full of enthusiasm for this new opportunity, but now you're wondering, where do I start?
In fall 2023, we partnered with Nancy Molello, executive director of the Ginsburg Institute for Health Equity, a new organization based in Central Florida and funded by Nemours Children’s Health, asking the question: What if we lived in a community where all children were treated equally and were healthy?
What Made this Process Work
The Ginsburg mission wasn’t born overnight. It resulted from hours of conversations, Nancy’s thought cycles, and a series of strategic coaching and facilitated sessions that involved:
Drafting the organization’s mission, vision, and values.
Designing three strategic pillars.
Laying out a strategic roadmap.
Sharing the plan and gathering feedback.
And putting together an all-star team to organize and execute these goals.
The process looks straightforward when written down like this, but kicking off a new effort, especially one of this scale, is rarely smooth sailing.
Less than a year later, the Ginsburg Institute team is well underway to becoming a high-performing, aligned unit ready to live its mission.
Setting the Scene
To support Nancy through the kick-off process, we set up a series of bi-monthly standing meetings over about four months, primarily between Nancy, our lead strategic facilitator Lauren, and, as needed, other Ginsburg team members and key stakeholders.
As facilitators through this process, it was important to have our own roadmap to prevent getting lost in the journey. As “navigators,” our roadmap of activities—or strategic planning checklist—served as a compass for where we hoped to be and when.
Our checklist is based on the Future Search model from Marvin Weisboard and Sandra Janoff and includes critical strategic activities that should happen in each phase. While we worked through this process over a series of coaching and facilitated meetings, this checklist can also be completed in one larger “chunk” of time as a two- to three-day offsite.
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GOALS:
● Build relationships
● Get to know key challenges and areas of opportunity
● Empathize and understand stakeholdersINPUTS
● Introductions to key stakeholdersOUTPUTS
● Interview/discovery notes
● Stakeholder map and/or user persona types -
GOALS
● Anchor the mission and envision a time-bound target/vision
● Create a high-level plan that shows connections between current and future state through a set of activities and initiatives
● Create a strategy for how to include stakeholders in the processINPUTS
● Clear understanding of stakeholders
● Clear understanding of problem statementsOUTPUTS
● Mission statement
● High-level vision and initiatives
● Strategic pitch that tells a compelling story
● Messaging/communications strategy -
GOALS
● Design the path forward
● Acquire and onboard key resourcesINPUTS
● High-level strategic planOUTPUTS
● Strategy roadmap (including “in-reach” and outreach strategy)
● Success measures
● Aligned resources (team, funds, other resources) -
GOALS
● Align the team
● Prototype/pilot ideas
● Execute on the plan
● Communicate with stakeholders
● Track and measure success
● Adjust based on learningsINPUTS
● Strategy roadmap
● Success measures
● Aligned resources (team, funds, other resources)OUTPUTS
● Project tasking system
● Team norming agreements ("ways of working")
● Standard operating procedures
● Measures dashboard
● Communication plan
When Nancy came on board in 2023, she hit the ground running, meaning that, at times, we worked in all four phases at once:
Executing initial projects (phase 4)
Meeting key stakeholders and gathering ideas (phase 1)
Creating strategic roadmaps (phase 3)
Gathering components of the mission and vision (phase 2)
Our Process
We used MURAL—an online whiteboard—as our lab space to brainstorm and form connections. After using it to establish our key strategic content (mission, vision, pillars, roadmap), we drafted a basic “Strategic Pitch” deck that Nancy could use to share the content amongst key stakeholders.
Next, it was time to gather a team that would help actualize this dream in the making. Nancy thought long and hard about what skills she needed on her dream team and set about interviewing and onboarding staff as quickly as possible. Top on her list of desired skills were (a) administrative support, (b) in-depth knowledge of the community they were serving, and (c) impeccable project management skills.
Once assembled, we facilitated a series of meetings with Nancy’s new team to introduce them to our strategic process and encouraged them to use the activities when it came time to work at the “next level down” and develop initiatives. We oriented the new project manager to our MURAL boards so they could use them as a starting point for their internal tasking system.
We also facilitated a “team norming session” with the newly formed team to help establish positive working norms, such as meeting cadences and communication practices.
What to Take Away
Kicking off a new project is never easy, so learning to thrive in the ups and downs is key to making it through to success. For leaders, especially new project leads, it’s important to have people around you who can help you navigate the process.
We leaned on the Grove’s strategic visioning toolkit and the Future Search model to anchor our process, and we are heavy users of MURAL as our preferred online whiteboard system.
To learn more about how we can support your project’s kick-off, explore our MeetingMakers Framework and reach out to schedule time to chat.
