How to Create a Project Communication Plan

Effective communication is the essence of project management, making a communication plan vital. According to the Project Management Institute, high-performance organizations who finished 80% of projects were twice as likely to have communication plans in place than their low-performing counterparts. If you don’t have a plan or want to update your current plan, read on!

Why do I Need a Communications Plan for my Project?

Communication is a “process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior”. Sounds easy? Unfortunately, effective communication is quite rare! Lack of time, personal styles, daily distractions, and assumptions can easily disrupt communication. As pointed out by playwright George Bernard Shaw, ‘’The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.’’

A project communication plan is a blueprint for communication processes during your project. The plan should help provide the right information to the right person at the right time in a format that works for them. Having a plan will:

• Make it easier to secure stakeholder buy-in and support
• Set expectations with stakeholders, the project team, and external vendors
• Improve decision making
• Keep the team up-to-date with current and upcoming tasks
• Define roles and responsibilities, for example, who needs to attend weekly status meetings
• Improve meetings
• Outline processes for dealing with risks and issues.

How do I Prepare a Communications Plan for my Project?

Creating a communication plan typically takes place during the planning phase of your project. To save time, check if any templates or guidelines exist within your organization you can use.

There are five key steps to follow when preparing this document.

The first step is to decide your objectives for the plan, and what you want to achieve through effective communication. This can include:

• Building support for the project
• Improving stakeholder engagement
• Gathering inputs from the project team.

It’s important to link your objectives with the overall project plan to ensure that the team is fully aligned and understand the metrics of success.

Next, create a list of who needs to receive project information. Typically, you should involve:

• Stakeholders
• Project team
• External Vendors
• Relevant internal departments.

1. Decide what information is needed

Different team members team need different information to contribute positively. Tailoring information also saves time for the recipient.

Take a look at your audience and think about what they need to know. Here are some ideas to get started with:

• Stakeholders: Project plan, status, budget, change requests and risk management.
• Project team: Assignments, status, work in progress, issues and risk tracking, and lessons learned.
• External Vendors: Schedule and deadlines, status, and any delays.
• Relevant internal departments: Status, including any changes to deliverable deadlines.

The key to effective communication is discovering other people’s needs and adapting your communications methods accordingly. Taking time to understand and implement this approach increases the likelihood that your audience will pay attention to what you say, leading to more successful outcomes.

Common communication tools include:

• Meetings: Although much maligned, project meetings are a great way to bring the team together and solve problems. Make sure your meetings are productive with these tips.
• Project Reports: Use a collaborative project tool such as BrightWork to quickly pull together relevant information from different sources into the required format. Report types include project progress, the ‘My Work’ report, real-time dashboards, risks, and resources.
• Email: Arguably the most common form of project communication. Although email is a useful way to track conversations and decisions, encourage your team to talk to each other — it’s often more efficient!
• Discussion boards: Online discussion boards and forums help teams to collaborate and share knowledge, and are especially useful for remote teams.
• Document Repositories: Create a central location for project documents to ensure everyone is working from the same sources.
• Surveys: Surveys are a quick way to check in with your team during project execution and document lessons learned once the project is over.

Ask your stakeholders and project team how they wish to communicate — weekly meetings, emails, project dashboards and so on. This step becomes even more important when the amount of project data and available communication tools are considered.

Once tools are identified, establish communication frequency, for example, weekly status reports via email and monthly face-to-face meetings with your stakeholders.

Finally, outline who is responsible for each communication channel.

Given how crucial communication is to your project, it’s important to track and analyze your plan at regular intervals. Schedule time to see what’s working, what isn’t, and what adjustments are needed. Also, ask stakeholders and the team for their input. Document your findings to improve future plans.

Communication Matrix

Team members and stakeholders are busy individuals with lots of competing demands! If possible, create a quick reference graphic which summarizes key takeaways from your plan. Here is a sample to help you get started.

Communication Action Plan

Having created your communication plan, you may also need to develop an action plan to track all activity. It is very easy to do this using Excel or SharePoint lists. Here are key elements to include:

• Audience: Who will receive the message?
• Message: What is the topic?
• Communicator: Who is delivering the communication?
• Schedule: When and how often will this take place?
• Method: How will the message be delivered?
• Status: Updates on communications to date.

Conclusion

Effective communication is crucial to successful project management. Don’t leave communication to chance; develop and share a plan with your team.

Do you have any comments or tips for creating and executing a communication plan? Share your experience below.

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Originally published at www.brightwork.com on May 22, 2017.