Key things to focus on at the beginning of a new project:
1. People:
- Identify all the key players, get their contact info (email, phone, IM) and their physical location/time zone too
- Get their schedules of availability for this project, including days they telecommute (WAH)
- Identify the official decision-makers and approvers: technical, business, design (tech = engineering + QA leads)
- Identify the role of other people involved (contributor, informed, etc.) and who to expect might pop-up down the road
- As the project evolves and scope is re-defined (which always happens!), more or different people will enter/exit as needed, adjust as necessary
2. Process:
- Decide the working style and process
- Decide whether to do in-person, phone conf, web conf, etc.
- Decide level of day-to-day involvement
- Make sure all in agreement, with room for adjustments down the road
3. Deliverables:
- Decide what the final deliverables will be and how success will be measured/identified
- Decide what the working/interim deliverables will be and how they will be reviewed (see Process above)
- Make sure all in agreement, with room for adjustments down the road
4. Schedule:
- What are the deadlines and milestones? What is expected at those points in time?
- Make sure all in agreement, with room for adjustments down the road
5. Materials:
- Gather the latest version of critical documents as fodder/material for analysis and discussion
- MRD, PRD, ERD: all technical and business requirements
- User Research: all personas, scenarios, use cases, taskflows, architecture or concept maps that have been done already even in preliminary form
- Prototypes, if any
- Screenshots, specs if any, and photoshop files
- Latest builds, if any