Comms Planning

Introduction

 

Your ability to clearly communicate your ideas can be the difference between winning a bid and loosing a bid, winning friends and loosing friends in the corporate environment, selling an idea and failing to sell an idea, gaining or loosing support for a piece of work, and the list could go on. How and what you communicate depends entirely on who your target audience is. So there is no one clear and simple mode of communications.

 

Collateral

Imagine your engaged as a building project manager in a piece of work to construct a building in a major city.  There are number of key stakeholders who are interested in this project and wish to be either, consulted or kept informed regarding the progress of the work.  Two stakeholders that have come to your attention are the chief financial officer (CFO) of the project and the senior structural engineer.  Both these stakeholders have a requested reports on the progress of the project.  

You now find yourself in the situation where you quickly realise that they are both interested in the same thing but very different types of information.  To successfully report to both these stakeholders, you must relay the right type of information.  The CFO is looking for financials, time frames, costs, return on investment figures, where money is being spent, where money will be made and saved, it will be highly unlikely that they will understand and be interested in the detailed structural engineering models.  The structural engineer is interested architecture schematics, time frames, costings, material catalogues, and stress and load reports etc.  Clearly each stakeholder has a different viewpoint on the same problem.

To successfully manage the relationship between each stakeholder, you must identify who are stakeholders, understand their viewpoints, and report to them using their viewpoints by producing reports containing views that are realizations or their viewpoints.

There are a number of useful techniques that you can employ to help you manage the relationships between stakeholders and yourself.