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Pre Inception (Project Kickoff) Checklist

Alignment and Expectation setting
Alignment is about making sure you and everyone else are on the same page with regard to why we are here, what we’re trying to do, and how are we going to get there. Basic stuff.
Expectation setting, on the other hand is about you communicating clearly with your team and stakeholders what it is going to take to make this project a success. You are defining the rules of engagement.
Gain and sustain commitment for the project goals or objectives
Resolve any potential conflicts on project

Why Inception
Why are we here?
Business vision
Objectives and scope Logical scope
Technical vision - The purpose of the Technical vision is to get a sense of the complexity, architecture, and technologies involved in the implementation of the system.
Risk management - Talking about the project’s biggest risks, and how the team is going to mitigate them while we are all calm and rational, is much easier than doing so after.

Tool / Artifact - Scope / Persona
Owner - Product Owner
Objectives
Discuss about the high level scope. He also discuss about assumption and /or open questions ,as well as testing assumption and business process assumption.
Identify and define all the end user that will "touch" or "use the system to be built. This provides team with an understanding of who , when/frequency, where and why each "Persona' uses the system. Identify the user allow team to 'connect' with the user.
User Journey- Provide clear understanding of the roles and the users ( who will use the existing pain points of the business process that is being incepted.
Provide good grounding points for project team to understand the flow of business as it exist before inception.
Provide simple view of what new vision is.

Tool / Artifact - Existing Technical architecture and footprints / Existing technical problems/risks that are known
Owner - Solution Architect/ Technology Manager
Objectives
Solution Architect required to provide diagram of current architectural footprint across relevant system to the project.
Solution Architect required to provide a list of known technical debt across system, as well as any known production support issues that have not yet been addressed.
Determine the tech architecture / stack that will be used for the project.
Identify and document any spikes that are required to finalize the stack.
Agree on a sizing methodology.

Tool / Artifact - Inception Schedule
Owner - Scrum Master
Objectives
Plan out high level agenda of the Inception. Key item to ensure appropriate business stakeholders and SMEs know when they should attend when the conversations are relevant to them.

Tips
Do not dig into the details
Discuss testing needs and approach