Structure—Your Plan for Communications Success

In Part 1, I discussed what goes wrong with communications. In this segment, I want to go over how a communications plan can help create success.

By defining a communication strategy at the beginning of your project, you can think through the big picture. Message and audience are key to every communication, so thinking it through up front helps you head off trouble that might result from misunderstandings or oversights. And for everyone—communicator and audience—it also level-sets the process so everyone knows exactly what will happen in the project communications and what’s expected of them in the process. Communications then become more effective because:

• Communicators become more intentional with their messages—They know what is shared, why it is shared, and by whom and with whom it’s shared, so that all that needs to be explained clearly comes across to the right people in the format they expect it in.
• Method and frequency are defined—Scheduled and purposeful communications get more attention—if players are receiving dashed-off updates every day throughout the day, the messages will eventually become white noise and be ignored (a real problem if the status includes an issue needing to be addressed!). But keep in mind, on any project, things change and things come up, so your communications need the flexibility to adapt when needed.

This approach promotes structure in your communication. It reduces the effort that goes into each message while at the same time increasing each one’s intentionality—making everything easier for the senders to put together and easier for the receivers to understand.

How often you communicate and what mode of communication you use depend on both the needs of the project you’re communicating about and your organization’s culture.

Defining communications for the project needs is easy. For example, if you’re in an IT environment and in the midst of product development, you probably don’t need to issue status updates more than weekly. But if you’re in IT and deploying a new system, you may need twice-daily updates—a morning update summarizing what was implemented during the overnight upgrades, and an end-of-day update on the performance of each segment implemented. The mode might be, email, where a written summary listing each segment and its success is sent to key managers and team members to keep them apprised.

On the other hand, working around company culture can be trickier. A small organization that’ used to handling communications as-needed and face-to-face may chafe at the structure of a written daily email update. Or the reverse could be true: an organization accustomed to detailed status reports at each even minor milestone might not want to give that up for a higher-level weekly overview. But however you decide it, adhering to the communications plan structure is essential to ensuring the information in the message is effectively received.

What should your messages say? I’ll talk about that next time.