Imagine you’re an enterprise architect for a large financial technology company. You or a new colleague have been tasked with leading a newly established team to rearchitect how data flows through your systems. This is a major project, one that’s a critical prerequisite for a 2.0 redesign of your company’s technology. You’ve been given six months to deliver on the bet that’s been made on you and your team. Oh, and the team you're working with doesn’t have any project management experience.

Where do you start?

Every day, millions of employees are asked to manage projects—big and small—without any prior project management knowledge, experience or certifications. And the harsh reality is, most employers don’t recalibrate their expectations based on these facts. “Accidental” project managers are expected to deliver projects on time, within budget, and in alignment with organizational goals—just like a formal project manager with years of experience.

When asked to manage a project for the first time, you may begin to feel pressure—that there’s no time to waste, that you’ll have to learn through trial and error, that you should just get started.

• But what does getting started really mean?
• What’s your first step, and how do you know it’s the right one?

Historically speaking, these have been difficult questions to answer—in large part because beginner and/or accidental project managers have suffered from (a) an absence of quality resources to help them manage a project and (b) the pressure of learning the foundations of project management quickly, without compromising the time needed to actually do the work. When an entire team relies on its fearless project manager for direction, these shortcomings affect more than just the project manager. Enter Kickoff, a free digital learning tool that helps accidental or informal project managers launch successful projects—from start to finish—in just 45 minutes. No crazy jargon to hold you back, no boring lectures to put you to sleep, and certainly no unnecessary material you’d find in a capstone seminar.

Specifically, Kickoff offers:

• Simple, interactive exercises to complement and reinforce its bite-sized content.
• Downloadable templates to help start planning and getting work done immediately.
• Appropriate questions to ask at any stage of a project and to the right stakeholder(s).

When you complete Kickoff, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge required to launch a successful project, in addition to a playbook that’s always there for you to reference along the way. So, if you’re reading this, you were very likely entrusted to manage a project in the first place. Allow Kickoff to help complement your existing technical skillset and make you, and your team members, more capable of completing your objectives. To access Kickoff, simply visit kickoff.PMI.org and create a PMI account for free. Kickoff is a mobile-responsive application, meaning it’s built to work seamlessly on your laptop, phone, and tablet browsers. Remember, you can’t complete a project you don’t start. It only takes 45 minutes to start moving your project toward a successful outcome.