As with all things, preparing for a successful outcome with communications and public relations on a project starts with a good plan.  Creating a communication plan for your project helps you identify who your stakeholders are and what the unique communication requirements are of each constituency.  If you have stakeholders in different locations who will participate in meetings, you probably need to consider virtual meeting technologies such as the use of web tools that allow you to share documents real time to virtual audiences, as well as conference calling tools, for example.  You should also consider the different levels of detail and frequency of updates required by different audiences.  Some of the basic elements required in any communication plan include:

(Each item documented in communication plan should describe the following at a minimum)

Purpose What is the intent of the piece of the communication – meeting/report/presentation (i.e. to inform; to train; to gather information; to distribute status; )
Audience Who is the intended recipient(s) (what level; internal/external to organization; internal/external to project team)
Type What is the nature of the piece of communication – meeting/report/presentation
Frequency How often should this be delivered?
Day/Date of Occurrence What day/time  of week/month is it scheduled
Duration For meetings – how long does it last
Owner Who is responsible?
Format How is this delivered?  For meetings, what conferencing and virtual meeting tools are used?  For reports, what tools are used to prepare and distribute the report?  Any other formatting specifications.

 

Some of the obvious things that are usually captured in communications plans are:

  1. Weekly team status meetings
  2. Weekly status reports
  3. Executive steering committee meetings
  4. Stakeholder communication briefings
  5. Change control board meetings

Planning for these types of recurring communication events is a given to keep everyone apprised of progress and status.    

But now, let’s raise the bar.   Let’s face it; project management has a bad reputation.   Too many projects never seem to get completed successfully, or at least the ones we hear about anyway.   Could that be because the ones that get all the publicity are the ones in trouble?  You know the ones I’m talking about – the ones that are in flames until someone swoops in and does something herculean like pulling an all night’er or all weekend effort; or some team has to practically bring cots and camp out at work for a few weeks to pull things out of the ditch.  If you think about the most successful projects you’ve been associated with in the past , the ones that click along like clockwork, they’re usually so quiet no one even knows they happen.  I believe that’s because they are an accumulation of many small successes that by themselves, seem too small to talk about, but accumulate to make a winning outcome.  The real heroes are those team members who can perform their duties according to plan with high quality, and low drama, day in and day out.  Sadly, all too often that type of effort never gets enough credit.  The team members may get the credit individually in performance reviews, but the project doesn’t get the notoriety or PR benefit.

We need to create ways to herald these small “wins” and outline them in the communications plan.  This may take some forethought or preparation to set up beforehand.  You may be able to arrange for real estate on your intranet to publish weekly installments of progress reports.  If not, you can devote space on your project site or repository and open it up to stakeholders.  You may want to consider creating a project bulletin board, or area such as a “Victory Corner”, or create a project blog.  Or maybe in your environment you need to go non electronic by posting signs on break room walls.  Consider what works best for your environment and organizational culture.   Decide on who is responsible for updating these vehicles and at what frequency, what events will trigger their updates, and document in the communications plan.  In the final installment of this series, we will discuss some possible and suggested events that could generate good public relations material for the “wins” vehicles. 

Recognizing the small wins is a great way to give credit to the people who deserve it and draw attention to successful projects that get otherwise overlooked.