<aside> đźš© A kickoff meeting is a meeting of all the members of a design team, plus any other stakeholders involved in a design project.
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Holding a kickoff meeting is the first task of a design project. The goals of the meeting are to become acquainted, agree to the general intention of the project, develop a document specifying the team's expectations for the project, and to develop a set of questions the answers to which will inform the team's immediately subsequent activities.
If you don't believe in the importance of kickoff meetings, then please read the short article The Best Laid Plans, by Edward P. Youngberg.
Make sure you read about Successful Meetings.
Here's what you need to do for a proper project kickoff.
Goal: Team members get to know each other.
First things first. All team members should exchange their names and school email addresses.
<aside> <img src="/icons/warning_orange.svg" alt="/icons/warning_orange.svg" width="40px" /> Don't share your personal email addresses; share phone numbers only if everyone agrees.
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Each team member should introduce himself to the rest of the team. Talk about yourself and your skills. Do you have any engineering experience? Do you have any experience that relates to the goals of the design project? Do you work on your own car? Have you worked in a machine shop or taken shop classes? Have you done any creative problem solving? Why are you studying engineering? Where do you want to end up working?
Spend some time (say, 10 or 15 minutes) getting to know one another. Teams that perform well are usually those whose members can get along relatively well with one another. You do not have to become best friends, but you have to learn to work together.
Goal: All team members agree on the intention of the design problem as given in the Design Brief.
Having “broken the ice,” now a team should turn to the design problem. Read it over and discuss it to make sure everyone understands it.
<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_blue.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_blue.svg" width="40px" /> Seniors and grad students will also choose their design projects at this point. Your instructor will explain the details.
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Is there anything vague about the problem? Remember, these are design problems: they're supposed to be naturally open-ended and somewhat vague. If there is agreement that some part of the problem is too vague, ask your instructor for clarification.
Does every team member agree about what has to be done? Consider the following scenario.
A design team is given the task: “Your client has contracted you to design a new retractable pen.” Stan: “Okay, we need to design a ballpoint pen.” Martha: “Wait a minute. It says 'pen' here, not 'ballpoint pen'.” Tom: “Oh come on – have you ever seen a retractable fountain pen?” Martha: “No, but so what?” Stan: “Okay, let's ask the instructor.”
In this case, Martha and Stan see the same problem in two different ways. There are two questions here that the team has to answer:
In this case, it's up to your team to reach an agreement about the meaning of the word “pen”. If Martha thinks the word includes fountain pens, but Stan doesn't, then there will be difficulties further along in the design process, because Martha and Stan are actually working on different design problems.