Project
Management Communication
Communications Plan
Need project management
communication for an information management project and want some
practical suggestions to ensure rapid project delivery?
A communications plan specifies how communications will be
maintained
among and
between project team members.
Why is this
important?
This key document ensures that all stakeholders are aware of the
communication channels and helps avoid confusion and misunderstanding.
A
typical case of bad communications
A quality assurance
test run has
been running for 6 hours and the normal duration is 30 minutes—the
production support specialist sends an email to all developers at 2:00
AM asking for help. One dedicated developer, who is not on
the release team, makes a good suggestion, and the job is aborted and
re-started.
Unfortunately, that was not
the
correct answer because the
job was actually expected to take 10 hours because of
specialized processing required for the test.
The impact of this bad, but well-intentioned, communication—Two days lost
while restoring the data base environment and re-starting all processes.
In this case, the correct communications channel should have been
direct to the
release
manager who knew that the job would run at least ten hours.
This type of communication happens all
too
frequently and results in
considerable project
loss—A well planned, and well managed, communication plan
will prevent things
like that
from happening to you.
What is
normally included in a project management communication plan?
Projects normally have on-going communications such as:
- Status
reporting;
- Project schedule updates;
- Financial updates; and
- Risk and
issue reporting.
They also have one-time or infrequent communications such as:
- Project
kick-off meetings;
- Phase kick-off;
- Lessons learned; and
- Others...etc.
Things to
consider...
I have found that the following are frequently forgotten in project communication:
- Policy, standards & best practices, to
ensure everyone is aware
of expectations;
- New team member on-boarding, to ensure everyone
“ramps up” quickly and
is aware of project objectives (how many times do we promise
to do this?
- Defect management reporting;
- Change management communications;
- QA test reporting; and
- Release management communications.
What should the plan include?
The following example shows what is expected in a communications plan.
| Who |
What |
How |
When |
Owner |
| Name
and role of person who will receive the communication. |
Purpose for communicating (i.e. Project
Status update, financial
status update, Review Issues) |
Method
of communicating (i.e. Status Report, PowerPoint
presentation) |
Daily,
Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly |
Person
who will create the communications |
Summary..
A communications plan specifies how project management communication
will be
maintained among and between project team members.
This key document ensures that all stakeholders are aware of the
communication channels and helps avoid confusion and misunderstanding.
|
