There’s no doubt that you need two kick off meetings – the first one to decide what the project exactly is (this might require some debating between the stakeholders) and the second one for everyone to sign off your plan, so nobody can say they didn’t know or were unhappy with the outcome.
Also, I’m a believer that projects – big ones at least – should have three documents (this is taken from PRINCE2, I’m not a fan but I do like this bit!). First there’s a brief, where someone writes roughly what the project is (could be the big boss, or the PM) and everyone else can think about “Do we really want to do this? Is it the kind of thing we do? Does it fit with our overall strategy at the moment?” If YES, then we move to the Business Case – do we have the money, will it pay for itself, does it make financial sense? If YES, then finally we write the PID (Project Initiation Document) – this is the detailed project plan, with who will do what and when. We don’t want to do all this PID work unless it’s a project we want to do and it makes financial sense to do it.
So far so good. BUT…. When do we have the meetings?
As you can see from this diagram, there are arguments for the Brief to be written before OR after the first kick off meeting – do we need the meeting to decide what’s in the brief? Or to decide whether it’s even worth doing the brief? My feeling is that the brief is what you bring to the meeting, so it should be done before, but that’s only my opinion.

I think we can all agree that the Business Case goes between the two meetings. But what about the PID? My feeling is that the PID would probably be done before the final meeting, which is where the PID gets signed off – but again, there could be an argument for having some input into the PID at the second meeting, or that the people at the second meeting done’t need to get involved in that level of detail so they can sign off “for the PID to be done”.
So to sum up. you could go for a process where the first meeting says “Yes let’s do it”, the PM goes away and does everything, and the final meeting signs it all off:

or the reverse, where each step is signed off by a meeting: (there’s an appealing neatness about this one)

but then, as described above, I think my favourite is this one: we bring a brief (whoever writes it) to the first meeting to discuss (we might go through lots of briefs giving giving each of them a yes or no), then after the meeting the PM does a quick financial check and if it looks good they do a full PID, which the second meeting approves:

and the final option would be the least favoured by me, but could still easily be justifiable – maybe you like it? It’s the loosest – we have a meeting and think “Let’s do this!” and almost like the minutes, a brief is circulated afterwards for people to sign off – then a business case is done: do we have the money / will it pay for itself? An outline plan is needed for this business case, so at the second meeting we do have something to look at and sign off, probably a high level Gantt chart and an overall budget (approximate estimate). If this looks good we sign it off and then the PM goes and does the detailed planning which is the PID. Only if the PID is massively different to the Business Case, in either time or money, does the PM need to get the PID signed off as well.

What do you think?
Which one to you prefer?
What do you use at your company?
