Coomm

Communications Management: Planning and Execution, from the ProjectExperts

Successful initiatives have plans and execution against those plans for each of the USA-NCB (National Competence Baseline) Technical competences. Yet planning and demonstrating the Behavioral competences is just as important, and while they are implied in the actions of project leadership, they may be frequently omitted. Note also, that an initiative’s interactions with the Contextual competences cannot merely be random and accidental. Thus all the other competences in the NCB form a checklist for Communications Management.

To support your communication needs, we provide a Sample Communications Plan for a large project. We suggest that you review the template (below), reduce the items where needed for medium or smaller projects, or add items, as needed. Below we explain the plan’s structure and content.

A simple and useful communication plan includes: What, Why, Who, When and How. This was inspired by Kathy Zarr, formerly of Northwestern Mutual and now of Metavante. She is one of the PM-Savvy people we most admire. Beginning with those five topics (which are often called the Journalist’s W’s), project teams add the project-specific information needed for pro-active communication. Those topics form the structure for the Sample Communications Plan that follows this explanation.

What: The Content of the Communication

Information can be of two types, depending on the areas of interest or concern for the Interested Parties. The Sample Communication Plan concentrates primarily on the Process Information, leaving the Product Information for application-area-specific methods to document:

• Product Information: What the project will produce (scope), at what level of quality, and impacts or benefits for the parties (reflecting change management and benefits realization)

• Process Information: Information about the size, timing, costs, internal risks, reviews and other needed...