The #1 Mistake Leaders Say Teams Make When Starting Projects
Purpose Clarity: Understanding the project's purpose upfront prevents misaligned efforts and enhances decision-making throughout execution.
Demanding Clarity: Encouraging team members to ask questions early reduces ambiguity and helps avoid escalating issues later.
Foundation Setup: Spending time on essential project setup prevents costly disruptions that arise from overlooking critical requirements.
Team Dynamics: Planning how team members will communicate and collaborate is vital for project success, not just task completion.
Role Definition: Project managers must clarify their roles at the outset to ensure effective leadership and prevent confusion.
There's a moment at the start of almost every project that looks the same: a kickoff meeting, a shared sense of momentum, and a team eager to get moving. It feels productive. It feels like progress. But seasoned project managers and consultants will tell you that this is precisely when the most damaging mistakes are made — not in execution, but in the moments before it really begins.
The errors that sink projects rarely announce themselves. They're the questions nobody asked, the conversations that never happened, the groundwork that got skipped in the name of speed. We spoke with consultants and project management leaders across industries, and what they described wasn't a long list of unique problems. It was the same handful of foundational missteps, repeated across organizations of every size.
Skipping the "Why": Failing to Understand the Project's Purpose
The most fundamental mistake a team can make at the start of a project is also the easiest to overlook: not stopping to understand why the project exists in the first place. Bruno Morgante, Founder and CEO at Mantegora, puts it plainly, saying, "I think the biggest mistake is not pausing at the beginning of a project to understand why are we even doing this? What's the purpose? What do we want to achieve with it?"
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I think the biggest mistake is not pausing at the beginning of a project to understand why are we even doing this? What’s the purpose? What do we want to achieve with it?
Without that pause, teams end up executing against deliverables with no real connection to the business value driving them. The work gets done, but it's disconnected from any deeper purpose — and when obstacles arise, there's no guiding "why" to help the team make good decisions about trade-offs or priorities.
The Silence Problem: Accepting Ambiguity Instead of Demanding Clarity
Even when team members sense that something isn't clear, they often say nothing. Whether it's a fear of appearing uninformed, a reluctance to slow things down, or simply a habit of deferring to whoever seems most confident in the room, ambiguity gets quietly accepted — and then quietly grows into a much larger problem.
Alexandria O'Bannon, Staffing Manager (Project Operations Manager) at JUMP! Foundation, describes this pattern directly: "Not getting clarity. I find that some people are afraid to speak up when things don't make sense or when they have questions."
[One of the biggest mistakes is] not getting clarity. I find some people are afraid to speak up when things don’t make sense.
The irony is that the discomfort of asking a clarifying question at the start of a project is nothing compared to the cost of carrying unresolved confusion through every phase of it. Teams that normalize speaking up early — that treat questions as a sign of rigor rather than weakness — tend to course-correct before misalignment has a chance to compound.
Rushing the Foundation: Skipping Setup in the Name of Speed
Tight timelines create pressure, and pressure creates shortcuts. When a deadline is already looming at project kickoff, the instinct is to start doing rather than start preparing. It feels counterintuitive to spend time on setup when time is exactly what the team doesn't have. But as Megan Cotterman, Fractional Project Manager and Operations Consultant, has learned firsthand, that trade-off almost always backfires.
"If there's a timeline involved, a lot of times teams just want to just jump right in," Cotterman says. "But I've learned the hard way that if there's some key things like missing requirements from the clients, or we don't have the proper system set up, that we end up eating more of the timeline in the long run. I think not getting a lot of the foundation set up at the start is a mistake that teams can make at the start of project."
I think not getting a lot of the foundation set up at the start is a mistake that teams can make at the start of project.
Missing requirements and misconfigured systems don't disappear when you skip past them — they wait. And they surface at the worst possible moments, when the team is already deep in execution and has the least flexibility to absorb the disruption.
Forgetting to Plan the Team, Not Just the Work
Project plans are built around tasks, timelines, and deliverables. Rarely are they built around people — specifically, around how the people doing the work will actually function together. That gap, according to Jeremiah Hammon, Leadership and Project Manager Trainer at Project Revolution, is one of the most consequential oversights a team can make at the start of a project.
"A lot of us focus so much on the project itself that we forget about planning the team and you've got to plan the team," Hammon says. "Even if they're not your team, plan how you're going to interact, how you're going to talk, plan the rules. What are our core norms going to be like? Who are we going to be as a team is so important."
A lot of us focus so much on the project itself that we forget about planning the team. Plan how you’re going to interact, how you’re going to talk, plan the rules.
This kind of team planning — defining communication expectations, decision-making norms, and how conflict will be handled — isn't soft or supplementary. It's infrastructure. Teams that skip it tend to find out exactly why it matters the first time a disagreement stalls progress or a communication breakdown costs them a week.
Undefined Roles: Project Managers Diving In Without Establishing Authority
Project managers are often hired or assigned for their ability to get things done. So it makes sense that the instinct, on day one of a new project, is to start doing. But Oliver F. Lehmann, Project Business Trainer at Oliver F. Lehmann Project Business Training, argues that the very first task a project manager should tackle is one that many never complete: defining their own role.
"Project managers have a tendency to jump into the task or challenge they want to meet and they don't understand the thing that they should do first is clarify their role," Lehmann says. "And by the way, the organization should see it like that. Before we want this project manager to manage the project, we have to clarify. What is the role?"
Before we want this project manager to manage the project, we have to clarify. What is the role?
Without that clarity, a project manager is operating in ambiguous territory — unsure of where their authority begins and ends, and potentially so is everyone else on the team. The result is hesitation where there should be decisiveness, and overreach where there should be boundaries.
Excluded from the Start: When Delivery Teams Miss Critical Early Conversations
Some of the most consequential project decisions are made before delivery teams ever enter the room. Pricing negotiations, margin targets, and scope trade-offs happen between sales and leadership — and the people who will actually have to execute against those decisions often aren't part of the conversation.
Alexa Alfonso, Sr. Account Executive at Caylent, has seen this dynamic play out repeatedly: "There is a lot of important conversations happening between sales and leadership when it comes to margin. I haven't seen a lot of delivery or project people in those conversations. And so again, they're handed this present. Sometimes the present is good and sometimes the present has some surprises where margin expectations are maybe not proactively communicated."
There are a lot of important conversations happening between sales and leadership when it comes to margin. I haven’t seen a lot of delivery people in those conversations.
When delivery teams are handed a project without context about how it was scoped or priced, they're starting from a deficit. They may be working within constraints they don't fully understand, making decisions that unknowingly conflict with commitments made upstream. Bringing project and delivery voices into those early conversations isn't just good practice — it's a way of preventing a whole category of misalignment before it ever has a chance to take hold.
The Pattern Beneath the Mistakes
What's striking about the mistakes these experts describe is how little any of them have to do with execution. No one is talking about poor resource allocation mid-project, or scope creep in week six, or a risk that materialized without warning. Every issue traces back to the same source: something that should have happened at the very beginning — and didn't.
The questions that went unasked. The "why" that was never articulated. The team norms that were never established. The role that was never defined. The delivery lead who was never in the room. These aren't failures of competence or effort. They're failures of intention — of treating the start of a project as a moment that deserves as much rigor and attention as everything that comes after it.
The next time a project kicks off with a sense of momentum and urgency, it's worth asking: are we moving fast because we're ready, or because we haven't stopped to find out if we are?
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