More on Project Communications Plans

As I’ve been stating recently, I feel it is necessary that both new and old project managers have access to as many potential processes and templates as possible – especially those working as consultants that may be acting outside of PMOs with their own processes and governing policies.

I’ve previously posted the article entitled “The Project Communications Plan” and have supplied actual communications plan documents to many readers over the past few months. The offer still stands – email me if you want a copy.

Carl Pritchard presents nice information on the details and uses of the project communications plan in his book “The Project Management Communications Toolkit.” For the benefit of our readers – mainly to give you different perspectives and templates to choose from, I am presenting Mr. Pritchard’s outline below.

The Communication Plan Defined

Purpose

The communications plan provides direction on which stakeholders should be discussing project business with which other stakeholders, the tools they should use, and the degree to which they should be sharing, documenting, and storing that information. Because of the number of stakeholders involved in a single project and their diverse roles, the communications plan orchestrates project communication through a cohesive approach to information sharing. It is a critical deliverable to the planning process.

Application

The communications plan is shared openly with all internal project stakeholders to help them understand how they should communicate and with whom. For external project stakeholders, the communications plan is normally filtered to present information only germane to their role and use.

Ideally, the list should be built in a spreadsheet program that allows the user to filter stakeholders by communications modes, contacts, frequency, or other category as appropriate.

The communications plan should reflect communications as dictated by the contract, memorandum of understanding, or statement of work, as well as any other protocols that became self-evident during the project’s evolution. Different project participants will use the communications plan in different ways:

• The project manager uses the communications plan to ensure that the various stakeholders are aware of their communications responsibilities to each other and to the organizations.
• Team members use the communications plan as a combination contact list and guide, with an interest in the types of communication preferred by the various users.
• Senior management and customers may use an abridged version of the communications plan to be clear on when to expect certain reports and documentation, and for contact information on their primary points of contact.

Content

The communications plan is a matrix of information, normally built in a spreadsheet program with the following data:

• Stakeholder name
• Primary contact
• Secondary contact
• Telephone
• E-mail
• Postal mail address
• Preferred communications mode
• Best time
• Frequency of communication

Because it is built in a spreadsheet format, the communications plan can be sorted and reordered in a variety of ways. If the types of communication (status reports, team meetings) are most important, they may be the first column, followed by frequency of communication and stakeholders (recipients and attendees, respectively). If physical proximity is an issue, the primary consideration may be the postal mail address, which can be sorted to determine which stakeholders are in common regions or locales.

Because communications breakdowns are frequently rooted not in miscommunication, but by a lack of communication, the notion of the “best time” for meetings, reports, contacts, and phone calls is crucial. If certain team members can only attend project meetings before 3 p.m. because of personal concerns, the project communications plan should highlight those interests. If a customer is never available before 10 a.m. for phone calls, such concerns should be noted as well.

Approaches

The communications plan is one of the most publicly available of the project documents. Because it serves as the framework for open communication among team members, the customer, and other stakeholders, complete and abridged versions of the document may exist, depending on the audience. If varying versions are used, some form of version control (e.g., 1.0 = complete plan, 1.1 = customer abridged, 1.2 = management abridged) should be applied.

The communications plan serves as more than just a phone directory. It provides information on the communications sensibilities and sensitivities of all of the personnel involve.

Considerations

While the plan is widely available, some stakeholders are proprietary about their contact information, and those concerns need to be respected. The communications plan should not become a medium for those who wish to broadcast information randomly to all project parties. It should be used to focus communications on an as-needed basis.

Dangerous ideas – and how to address them (part 3)

Yesterday I looked at how to overcome the problem of having to do more with less, what happens when you work in an environment where project management is perceived to be a useless overhead and the risks of embarking on a schedule in which you have low confidence. Today, I have three more lessons from Ernest Baker’s presentation at last month’s PMI Global Congress North America, ‘Ten troublesome project management ideas and how to combat them!’

6. Bad multi-tasking

Baker said that multi-tasking is actually a problem on projects – if you do it badly. There’s a risk that if you don’t multi-task effectively you will end up:

• Spreading your resources too thinly
• Suffering from interruptions and constantly starting and stopping
• Making slow progress on all tasks
• Having to use heroic efforts to get the project completed (and see Wednesday’s article for why that’s a bad idea)
• Suffering from quality issues across products, processes and your own quality of life!

Baker recommended that project managers shouldn’t multi-task. He suggested that you schedule ‘focus days’ – where your team gets together and just works solidly on a particular issue with no interruptions. You can do the same thing by blocking out time in your calendar so that you aren’t invited to meetings, for example at the end of each week for status reports, or on a monthly basis to make sure you have time for risk and issue reviews.

Baker also suggested that you focus your efforts on tasks that are important, not the ones that are flagged as urgent. You’ll have to find a balance, and I’ve written about that before.

7. Proximatic Competency

What, you haven’t heard of proximatic competency? Don’t worry, it’s a term that Baker confesses to having made up himself. He defines it as:

Any resource within a certain distance of a discipline or skill has the same level of knowledge, skills and ability as the entire group within that discipline or skill.

Still not clear? What he means is that proximatic competency assumes that everyone in a department has the same skill set. You’ll know from your own experience that this isn’t true. Even people with the same job title and doing the same job tend to have varying skills or knowledge. Managers sometimes make the mistake of forgetting that, and that’s when you end up with:

• Project teams made up of whoever is available
• Estimates that are not accurate as the people making them don’t have the skills
• Proxies being sent to meetings and then being unable to make decisions
• Knowledge gaps
• Information not being passed on to others in the same department

Baker recommends educating your stakeholders regarding the skills that you need on the project. And not letting them get away with giving you people that can’t do the job. He also suggests asking a lot of questions, and using techniques like the ‘5 whys’ to get to the bottom of requirements and estimates.

8. Inaccurate reporting

Finally, for today, Baker’s ninth ‘troublesome idea’ that stakeholders have is that which comes from inaccurate reporting. He summarised this as ‘watermelon projects’: projects that are green on the outside (in the reports) but red on the inside (the team knows that something is going wrong). Reports that don’t cover the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth mean that the senior stakeholders don’t know the whole picture. And therefore they can’t make better decisions. To combat this, Baker recommends:

• Defining project objectives
• Agreeing metrics and tolerances per phase and for the whole project
• Having a communication plan for your project
• Spending time building relationships with stakeholders

Tomorrow I’ll be looking at the final of Baker’s ten troublesome ideas!

Missed the previous articles?

Read part 1 here

Read part 2 here

Quality Manager (QC)

Location: Surrey
Salary: £40,000 to £50,000 depending on experience, qualifications and skills
Company: Converge Recruitment
Sector: Building services
Job role: Other construction roles
Job type: Permanent

Defence Services Project Quality Manager

Location: Surrey

Salary: £40,000 to £50,000 depending on experience, qualifications and skills

Benefits: The client offers a competitive salary and a comprehensive range of lifestyle benefits, including a flexible work schedule.They are also committed to the development of their employees and actively support career progression through their training and appraisal programs.

The Client

When you become part of the team, your opportunities are endless. As a leading global engineering, construction and services company, they support the energy, petrochemicals, government services and civil infrastructure sectors on six continents. Serving their customers through six diverse business segments – Government & Infrastructure, Services, Upstream, Technology, Downstream and Ventures – they offer challenging assignments on some of the world’s largest and most complex projects. Their clients value them because they know They Deliver.

With more than 50,000 employees around the world, they deliver top-quality service and performance in engineering, construction, operations and maintenance, logistics and project management services to clients who entrust them with their most vital projects.

Apply here.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

Does your project have a communications plan?  It’s often something that less experienced project managers forget to do.

The purpose of a communications plan is to define all the people or groups who have an interest in the project and to document how and when they communicate with, or receive communication from, the project.

If that all sounds quite complicated, it really isn’t.  The first step is to work out who your project interacts with.  You probably have a list of stakeholders already, so use those.  Don’t forget any groups of people or external parties.  The marketing department, for example, could be one entire group – you don’t have to list everyone in that team.  Equally, you may have to deal with a government body; an external stakeholder maybe represented by one named individual who is your main point of contact.  Make sure all these people and groups are on your list.

Establish for each entry on your stakeholder list:

1. What information do they require?
2. Who will provide that information?
3. How often do they need it (or how often is it produced)?
4. How will it be communicated?

So, let’s take your project steering group as an example.  It is probably made up of 3 to 5 senior managers and let’s say you all meet monthly to review progress.  We can answer the questions above for them like this:

1. They require a status update on how the project is going against the agreed scope, timescale and budget.  They also require copies of the minutes from steering group meetings.
2. The project manager will provide the information.
3. They need to see the status update in advance of the steering group meeting, on a monthly basis.  The minutes of steering group meetings will be circulated within 3 days of the meeting taking place.
4. The status update will be produced in Excel format and will be emailed to each member of the steering group.  The minutes will be produced in Word format and will also be sent out by email to each member of the steering group.

The more experience you have at managing projects the less likely it is that you will need to document every last thing that needs to be communicated.  However, even experienced project managers work to a communications plan.  You can put communications milestones in your project plan: send out steering group minutes, send out Marketing briefing, circulate user guide and so on.  Do you still need to communicate on small projects?  Of course you do (and you can read The PM Student’s approach to communication on small projects here).

Don’t forget that not all communication has to be written.  You can also include on your communications plan people with whom you communicate verbally.  Face-to-face meetings count as communication.  Telephone calls count as communication.  They may not be so formal as a briefing note that you write and send out on email but they are more appropriate for some audiences.

Finally, establish who needs to communicate with you.  Your project sponsor should be passing down information that is relevant, and other people or groups will need to keep you informed. They may not be as organised as you are, so make a note on the communications plan to chase them for updates when you need them!

Key Tip
Communication is important to all projects, so make sure you know who and what you need to communicate at every stage.