Every shift change in a hospital involves a handover. Ten to fifteen minutes of structured information transfer between the nurse coming off shift and the nurse starting one. Patient status, pending labs, medications due, changes in condition, things to watch for. If the handover is good, the next shift runs smoothly. If it’s bad, errors compound across the next twelve hours.
We used to sit in on those. They changed the way we run project kickoffs.
A bad kickoff looks like a conversation. People talk in rough outlines. Nobody writes anything down. Everyone walks out feeling aligned. A week later, the project manager is chasing assets, the designer is guessing at voice, and the client is wondering why nothing looks like what they described.
A good kickoff looks like a handover. Structured. Written. Boring in the best way.
The SBAR kickoff
Our kickoff template, stolen almost directly from clinical handover:
Situation. What is the project in one sentence? Not the vision — the deliverable. “A 5-page website for [business]. Launch target: [date]. Primary goal: [specific outcome].”
Background. What led to this? What has been tried before? What worked? What didn’t? (“We had a Squarespace site; it converted at 0.8% and was slow. Prior designer ghosted.”)
Assessment. What’s actually needed? What’s nice-to-have? What’s out of scope? Written down. Signed. Dated.
Recommendation. What’s the plan, phase by phase, with dates? Who owns what?
This acronym — SBAR — is the backbone of clinical handover. It also happens to be the cleanest project kickoff framework we’ve ever used. Not because it’s clever. Because it refuses to leave ambiguity. (It’s the first step in how we scope every build on the services page.)
Why most projects fail in week one
Most small-business website projects fail in the first week. They fail because nobody wrote down what the project was actually supposed to do. They fail because the client “knows what they want” and the designer “has a vision” and neither of those things is on paper. A month later, the launch gets delayed because the two people in charge have been building different sites.
The fix is a handover, not a meeting.
A fifteen-minute written kickoff prevents fifteen hours of rework. It’s the cheapest piece of project hygiene you can do. And it’s the one thing that separates a project that ships on time from one that limps across the finish line six weeks late.
Boring documents, calm launches. That’s the trade.