You scheduled a kick-off meeting in order to announce the start of your project, present the plan and develop consensus on it. Another topic will be explanation of each team member’s role. In addition, you planned some time for discussions.

You published the agenda of the kick-off meeting some weeks ago to all invited attendees.

Now, short term before the event, you receive various cancellations by team members, who say that they cannot join the meeting. But they will be with you when project work will start.

o The kick-off meeting is secondary, you are happy if the team members will do their jobs.
o You should insist on the presence of the team members to the appointed date.
o If you force team members’ presence, they would anyway be distracted by their current problems.
o It is probably a good idea to reschedule the meeting to a day, when all team members can attend.

Kindly explain the rationale behind ur response.

Thanks