Project Kick off phase cheat sheet, document writing tool benefits and my experience with Slite vs Confluence

PM findings #3: Sharing my list of questions for new projects and also talking about benefit of using document writing tool, comparing Slite and Confluence.

👋 Hi all,

I am posting weekly story to highlight interesting findings in Project Management, Startups, also my own experiences and lessons learnt. I hope this would add value reading.

🥁 New project kick off phase and key questions to address

Kick off phase is crucial for the project success, this is when you agree on rules. I’d say don’t start any project until you have those key questions defined:

• Who are key stakeholders of the project, what are their roles.
• What is the work process, are you working with Scrum, Kanban or some other method? Decide it and introduce key concepts to the stakeholders.
• Who is Product owner / manager, what is decision making process, who is involved in that.
• Communication plan, what channels are going to be used, scheduled meetings or ad hoc communication. Sort out this upfront, you can change it later for sure, but start with one, especially if you are working 1st time with the stakeholders.
• If you are working as an agency, learn what are contract terms of billing, is that fixed budget project, payments are monthly or after each iteration. This should be considered when making decisions during the project. Your agency is your project stakeholder as well.
• Reporting: what reports are expected to be provided. If you give access to your task management system and think that’s enough, don’t assume talk about it and confirm its truly fine for stakeholders. If again you are an agency, check with internal agency stakeholders as well.
• Acceptance flow, how deliverables are going to be shared with Product owner, how acceptance will be conducted.
• Tools to be used: define what essential tools you are going to use for Project Management, Development, Design, QA and maybe some other. For agencies, clearly define who is going to pay for those and who is going to have the ownership of accounts.

Those points are from my personal notes, which I have been using myself when taking any new project working in outsourcing company. I have been adding new points, for example I had point to clarify what OS versions we should start supporting for apps, is design to be only portrait oriented or landscape, do we have tablet support or only phones etc.

I would highly recommend you to create your own list of questions and keep it maintained. Trust me, that will save you lot of stress and pain for every new project you jump in.

✍️ Document writing tool

As project managers we need to write documents quite often, to share reports, some knowledge materials etc.

Until now I having been using documents (Word, Pages, Google docs etc) and I always caught myself in a fact that writing the content is one thing, but formatting it is another and quite a big deal.

I had one small assignment recently, which I needed to do fast and for that had an idea to use note taking or knowledge base tools. And this decision proved to be good one, because using blocks, styling, sections, integrations, etc is way easier and it keeps the general nice look and feel. They also have templates for various matters, which can help with the general structure of your post as well.

And for sure, those are great solutions to keep all your stuff structured and to create your own space or knowledge base. I am sure all know value of those tools for teams, this is I believe is the main use case, but I realized that using it for myself adds a lot of value too.

So, for that assignment I signed up for Confluence and Slite, wrote on Confluence then had to rewrite it on Slite.

Slite vs Confluence: Why I ended up with Slite?

• Exporting as PDF: So like I mentioned, this was an assignment which I needed to email to the stakeholder, they required a PDF file. Confluence was such a huge disappointment, formatting was so crashed, Slite does great job here. The only thing is you get Slite watermark on free plan.

You can find screenshots from PDF and web versions below. Confluence made progress, initial version was a total fail.

PDF Exports Confluence Dec 2020, Jan 2021/Slite PDF export Dec 2020

• Create public link: Confluence does not have option to share your post with public url, reader needs to be Confluence registered. Slite supports that and for users like me, thats a big deal. This gives chance to stay on free plan or pay only for yourself or the users who actually create content, while sharing it with everyone you find needed.
• Overall app performance and interface: Both tools had quite similar featureset. From what I recall which was missing on Slite was Roadmaps creation, but for the rest they are quite similar and to me I prefer Slite interface more and seemed Slite had better performance

Other factors I would consider if enrolling to paid plan and using that as knowledge base for teams:

• Companies: Confluence is Atlassian product, Slite is relatively new startup, which has fresh approach and as I see is really fast growing. However, if you are JIRA team, it might make more sense for you to stay within Atlassian ecosystem.
• Pricing: Slite limits number of docs and storage for free plan, but gives unlimited members and guests option. Confluence has limit of members and also gives 1 site restriction. As per my understanding if in your situation only few ppl create content, the rest are just consuming, Slite would be better.

I know that Notion is now booming and is widely used for teams as well, I have downloaded it, but still not catching it. As far as I know, it has freemium, so might work for you.

Slite is one of my favorite products now, they just have me with their clean interface, colors, esthetics and the calm environment they managed to achieve inside, which simply makes you write. So its one whole ❤️ from me, especially I see they now share valuable content for remote work as well, so take time to browse their website, even if you don’t really need the tool.

Thanks for reading through. Share your thoughts and own experience with us. Thanks for reading through. Share your thoughts and own experience with us.

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