The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - The First 30 Days of Any Project

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

Many projects struggle not because of poor execution, but because alignment was never built at the start. In this episode, Kevin Pannell shares practical leadership lessons on why the first 30 days of a project matter most.Drawing from experience in healthcare IT, emergency management, and cross-organizational initiatives, he explains how clear intent, open communication, and shared expectations set the tone for successful work. If you lead projects, teams, or initiatives, these early conversations can determine whether your work moves forward smoothly or spends months correcting avoidable problems.

Welcome back to People Process Progress. The first 30 days of any project is today's focus. This show is about getting meaningful work done, right? That applies whether you work in government, healthcare, public safety, or the private sector. The environments may be different, but the fundamentals of leadership, teamwork, and execution are remarkably similar. Today I want to talk about something that often determines whether a project succeeds or struggles long before the real work begins the first 30 days. Welcome to the People Process Progress podcast, where we talk about how to bring people together, align process, and build progress together. I'm your host, Kevin Pennell, author of of The Stability Equation, and the People Process and Progress of Project Management. To connect with me

and learn more, visit Peopleprocessprogress.com. If you find this episode helpful, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with others. Now let's get started. Many organizations rush through the early phase of a project, right? The pressures are understandable, leaders want progress, teams want to demonstrate value. Everyone wants to move quickly into requirements, documentation, and execution. Over the years, I've learned that the first 30 days of a project are rarely about producing deliverables. They're about building alignment. When alignment happens early, the project usually moves forward with far less friction. When it doesn't happen, the project spends the next six months or so trying to fix problems that started in the first few meetings. One kickoff that

stands out in my career that involved a project to replace payment machines across a huge organization. It involved new hardware, software changes, how patients pay, how patients pay, how employees interact with the payment systems, right? And what made the kickoff work well wasn't the technology, it was the people, right? The vendor team and our internal team aligned really well early. We set clear guardrails about expectations and responsibilities. We connected the right people from both organizations and made it clear that we were operating as one team working through or towards one outcome. There was a lot of tension about the change. Everyone understood the purpose of the work. The goal was improving the payment experience for patients and employees

across the organization. Unfortunately, I was pulled from that because I was needed to support a more pressing program that needed my attention. But the beginning of that project stands out because it reflected how projects should start, clear direction, open dialogue, one team, one plan moving forward together. When I start a project today, there are three things I try to clarify right away. First is leaders' intent. What outcome does leadership actually want? Not just the deliverable, but the reason the work matters. Second are the expectations of the organization as the client. I've often been the client to vendors, right? And every organization has different standards around communication, reporting, governance. Understanding those expectations early prevents confusion later.

Third is alignment around how we will practically plan, execute, monitor the work, right? How decisions will be made, how risk will be raised, how progress will be communicated. None of that really requires a long document. It just requires conversation. One of the sake I see often. is teams jump straight into requirements. And requirements matter, but when teams rush into them before alignments establish, the list grows quickly and then progress really slows down. Another issue is administrative overhead. Documentation standards are important, for sure,

but sometimes they grow to the point where documentation becomes the focus instead of the work itself. Both of these mistakes create the same outcome. The team spends energy producing artifacts instead of producing progress. So the first few weeks of a project should include a few conversations that cannot be skipped. Leaders need to clearly state what success looks like. Scope needs to be defined in plain language, what is included and what is not. The timeline needs to be discussed realistically.

And maybe most important, expectations for collaboration need to be spoken out loud. Right? Sometimes teams assume communication will just happen naturally. It doesn't always happen that way. When a sponsor, the person who's ultimately in charge, the business owner who's closest to the project operationally. And the project manager, who is us, whose job it is to facilitate the process and communication, openly state that the team will communicate regularly and honestly, it sets a tone that makes a real difference. The first month of a project reveals a lot.

It tells you whether the early estimates in business case were realistic. It shows how personalities and working styles interact. It reveals whether the team feels comfortable raising issues early or whether problems will stay hidden until they grow and fester and get bigger. Right. And those signals matter more than any project schedule. One concept that translates, well, from my emergency management days into project leadership, is called Unified Command. And incident management, leaders from different organizations align their authority and expertise.

They agree on direction and defer to the appropriate subject matter experts when needed. Less ego, more collaboration. The principle works in corporate environments too. When multiple departments or vendors are involved in a project, success depends on whether leaders are willing to align around shared outcomes instead of protecting their territory. Another issue I've seen in both emergency management and corporate is the assumption that communication is happening just because messages are being sent. When people ask for more information or clarification, that shouldn't be seen as a nuisance.

It should be seen as a signal that communication needs to improve. Instead of saying something like permanent-ass email, leaders should ask how the message can be delivered more clearly. That's that ownership. Communication is not just a team responsibility, right? It's a leadership responsibility. If you're about to start a project next week, there are five simple questions that are worth asking early and every project. One, what does done look like? What is the complete list of an example I've given before is the computers installed,

the referrals are connected, it's on the network, people can log in, they can open their software, right? It's this thing works, or this workflow now works, whatever it is. Whose story are we telling with the outcome? As a blank, I need to do blank so that blank. And you can insert that and you should do it for your team, for external folks, for internal folks. You should have multiple user stories that you're building outcomes towards, customer-centric work. Third, what project-level decisions can the team make without escalation? And the value of this is the team doesn't have to stop, come back to you for a decision, and then go unless it's more money or a lot more time or a huge change in scope.

But if they're allowed to make spend authorizations for a certain amount or make changes in the schedule within a certain number of days or even weeks for some long projects, then that gives them the autonomy to move more agile. Fourth, how does this work rank among the other priorities leaders are managing? Because as we all know, no one has limitless. funds, people, time. So we've got to know where this stands in the list of work to do. Fifth, how often do leaders want updates on progress? This is one of those communication assumptions that we as project managers shouldn't just assume they'll get the standard weekly update,

we'll do a monthly steering. Whatever your regular tempo is, customize it to fit the person you're doing the work for, the leader who you're working for in this temporary endeavor that is a project, that is time base. Right. So what does it look like? Whose stories are we telling? What project level decisions can the team make? How does this work rank among the other work? And how often do you want to know about progress and updates? If you have the answers to these, you can figure out all the details within this much easier. It's more smoothly and the team will operate with more decentralized autonomy.

One of the earliest warning signs when these five questions or information isn't shared is that there's project silence. team members are on calls or together but they're not communicating with each other they're not talking to you you can tell something's usually wrong right and the first 30 days should include very active dialogue calls messages quick check-ins real conversations right and that's one thing we as program project managers need to do is check in on the team how is communication do you have the information you need do you think you have the resources you need to solve this problem to get us to done to tell this story we need to constantly be checking in with folks and the easiest habit to do is to talk to people, right? Not just through slides or documents, but through direct conversations about the shared outcome

and the plan to get there. Because when people understand where the team is going, how the work will happen and that leadership supports them along the way, engagement tends to follow. And that last one is key, is the team needs to know that leadership is here to support you to remove barriers, to get you more stuff, more money, whatever we need, not to say, well, why is your project not perfect? and why are we moving the schedule? Now, those are valid questions,

but team members shouldn't feel like it's a penalty if something has to change, because as we all know, projects are going to change as soon as the plan is made. And I didn't learn these on every project perfectly. I learned by staying engaged, asking questions, taking ownership of the work.

I've also been fortunate to build strong relationships with people over time, relationships that carried forward, even as work became more hybrid or remote. And I've learned that leaders cannot avoid uncomfortable questions. In many cases, those are actually the questions that protect the project and that project managers need to lean into.

If I could give advice to my 35-year-old self, it would be simple. Any plan is outdated at the moment it's printed, and that's normal. What matters is making sure that everyone understands that changes as the plan evolves, right? So if there's a change, everyone at every level needs to know why. In some instances, it needs to be approved because there's maybe money or time or other big factors, and that everyone's on the same page and it's the same message. In the first month of a project, progress doesn't always look dramatic. Sometimes progress simply looks like efficient meetings, open dialogue, steady movement

toward the outcome the team agreed on. There's early signals of alignment often determine whether the next six months of work move smoothly or struggle. Thank you all for listening to the first 30 days of any project, things that I've learned. There's five questions to ask. They really do make a difference. and the key to all of this is open dialogue, direct communication, and just staying on the same page. People first, process aligned, progress together.

Godspeed, y'all. Thanks for listening to People Process Progress. If this episode helped you think differently about how projects begin, share it with someone who is about to start one, a teammate, a project manager, or a leader trying to get a new initiative moving in the right direction. You can find more episodes, articles, and resources at Peopleprocessprogress.com. If you want to keep the conversation going, you can find me on X and Instagram at Penel KG, PN-N-N-E-L-K-G, where I share lessons on leadership project management training and building a better life one step at a time. Also, hop over to the U-Y-O-U-S-Jitsu

podcast where I share some life and jujitsu lessons. Thanks again for listening because in many cases, success or failure isn't decided at the end of the project. It's decided in the first 30 days.