What's the full sentence? It can for example, mean that the project did not do very well at the beginning.

"But it got off TO a poor start initially." "To get off to a ___ start" is used to describe how something begins (eg. a race, a business, a meeting, a relationship, etc). You could understand your example as "it began poorly (but improved later)."

Another meaning for poor is bad. In other words, it was a bad start off. That means it doesn't start off very well to begin with.