Pre-mobilization

Guide to Pre-mobilization

Aligning everyone on their roles and responsibilities is an important activity, one that has strong and long-lasting impact on your project. This pre-mobilization checkpoint is held internally, prior to meeting with the customer.¹

Our goals and the corresponding impact of this activity are:

Inputs

Executive sponsorship is a key success metric. It means having buy in from someone with decision-making authority at your customer. Some people refer to this as a “champion,” who helps you align for success within the customer account.

• Executive sponsorship with the customer (buy-in from decision makers).
• Initial customer contact information (primary point of contact).
• Statement of work (“SOW”).

Process

Pre-mobilization is broken into two parts. The first is preparatory, gathering information, setting up your project wiki. The second is your formal, internal project kickoff with the team.

Before the engagement

1. Set up the customer’s “project wiki” and make sure your team has access. The wiki can be any suitable tool where you will record project activity (I recommend Atlassian Confluence for reasons I write about here).
2. Identify your team members and brief them on the engagement. This template provides a good starting point.
3. As soon as the engagement is scheduled, request from the customer (and document in the project wiki):
   1. The names, roles and contact information of the customer team who will be involved.
   2. Security and access requirements we need (e.g. security badge, facilities access, company laptop, VPN, etc).
   3. Access to any documentation or material we can review ahead of time.
   4. Access to source code (preferably via GitHub or other source repository access).
4. Make sure the statement of work is clear, and that it states distinct and easily understood outcomes that have transparent business impact:
   1. “Complete the following 10 features” does not express business impact.
   2. “Increase overall sales by 10% next quarter” expresses business impact.

Pre-engagement strategy session

1. Identify and have 1:1 briefings with your delivery team on the engagement, their roles and responsibilities:
   1. Using the attached template, build your team roles and responsibilities as best as possible at this stage. This will be your delivery team.
   2. Be sure to name and discuss roles and responsibilities with each team member ahead of time.
      1. It’s essential that team members know what’s expected of them, and are confident they can deliver. This helps define roles when interacting with the customer, and makes sure your team presents itself confidently.
2. Schedule a pre-kickoff internal meeting with the whole team (this includes delivery and business team members):
   1. Review what’s known about the engagement, including scope, roles and responsibilities.
   2. Talk about individual commitment, level of involvement, and ceremonies. Ceremonies like stand-ups and sprint demos will be scheduled later, but everyone should agree on what kind of ceremonies the team will follow.
   3. Identify skill or experience gaps. Are there other team members who would be a strong fit on this engagement, but who we can’t assign due to unavailability or other constraints?
   4. Identify any risks the team foresees. Any unresolved red flags or burning issues? This is a collective exercise to foster ownership.
   5. Identify what the team needs that they don’t have. Is there any special support required? If so, be sure to investigate this ahead of customer engagement.
3. Schedule your customer’s Project Kickoff, following the guidelines in 1.1 Team mobilization.

Outputs

• Team roles and responsibilities.
• Customer primary point of contact and stakeholder list.
• Clear objectives and anticipated customer business impact.
• List of anticipated risks and open issues along with a responsible owner for each.

Templates

• Pre-mobilization: Internal information gathering & briefing

Next activity

• 1.0 Mobilization (phase 1)
• 1.1 Team mobilization