Is "lays important groundwork" appropriate usage

As in: "My project lays important groundwork for a future project."

Is my usage of 'lays' correct? I'm not sure why I'm hung up on this, it just doesn't sound correct to me.

The sentence requires, in my opinion, the definite article as in:

My project lays the important groundwork for a future project

You could omit important or experiment substituting it with other adjectives such as essential, to see if the sentence has greater impact and flows more naturally.

My project lays the (essential) groundwork for a future project

Edit
I double-checked with Google books and lays the groundwork has 760,000 results while lays groundwork has "only" 2,790 results.