5 Important Questions to Ask When Building an Effective Project Communication Plan

February 5, 2024 Stan

When a project request comes in, ideally scope is clear for the Project Manager to begin and lead the project management process: kickoff, requirements gathering, building, testing, deployment, and post-implementation support. While the Project Manager may be leading the Project Team with the northstar in hand, it is also important to build out a strong and effective project communication plan for monitoring and controlling the project.

Here are 5 questions Project Managers should be able to answer when creating a communication plan.

1. Who is my audience?

Knowing the project’s stakeholder matrix will help determine the different levels of project status check-ins and status reporting to build out in a communication plan.

If the project includes executive sponsorship, establishing a Steering Committee is important. For example, a Marketing Automation Platform migration may be a piece of a larger organizational strategic plan, so providing project updates in a Steering Committee forum including other Project Managers leading other projects (e.g. CRM migration, brand transformation, etc.) would be most helpful to understand any major interdependent or independent progress and impacts to meeting an organizational goal and launch target.

Or perhaps the project is only a departmental change with a low impact to the rest of the organization. In that case, the Project Manager would establish Core Team check-ins with Project Sponsors and Subject Matter Experts or Project Leads to represent each function.

Most importantly, the Project Manager is to establish a regular check-in cadence with the Project Team responsible for building, testing, and deploying the project. At minimum, a project communication plan should include some type of check-in with the Project Team itself.

If there are 3rd party vendors included in a project with specific scope, the Project Manager may find it beneficial to include a vendor-only focused check-in with Project Sponsors or have a team representative receiving and/or sending updates with the Project Team.

2. At what frequency is each stakeholder group to check-in?

When Steering Committees are involved, the frequency would typically stretch over a longer period of time than a Project Team would meet to provide a summary of updates at a high level. For example, the Project Manager may establish a monthly or quarterly cadence. There may be times; however, if a project launch is critical with several high-risk interdependencies with other projects nearing a launch within a shorter time frame, switching to meeting every other week may be necessary.

Core Team check-ins are also less frequent as Project Sponsors may not have hands-on tasks and deliverables. They may meet every other week or weekly, depending on the size, timeline, and urgency of the project.

Project Teams with active team members gathering requirements, building, testing, and deploying will require more check-ins. For example, when in the testing phase, the Project Manager manages an issue tracker to help ensure that project deliverables are tested, issues identified and assigned for resolution, issues are resolved, ready for User Acceptance Testing (UAT), UAT issues identified and assigned for resolutions, UAT issues are resolved, and ready for deployment.

If the Project Team is quite large, it may also be beneficial for the Project Manager to check-in with build and test Project Leads to help ensure their management of each sub-team is supported.

Being clear on the frequency of check-ins within a communication plan also helps illustrate how often project status or information may change over time. This helps ensure each stakeholder group is receiving the most current and appropriate order of information.

3. What level of detail is needed for each audience?

In addition to identifying the check-in frequency, knowing what level of detail of the project to address is also an important component to include in a communication plan.

For some executive summaries, a high-level project health report using green, yellow, and red ratings would suffice. Definitions of each color could include: green = everything is on track, yellow = critical risk triggered with a mitigation plan in motion to address the issue, red = critical issue identified, no mitigation plan in progress.

Core Team check-ins will also still be at some kind of summary level; however, because of the audience between Project Sponsors and Subject Matter Experts, the level of detail can be a bit more in the weeds (e.g., specific campaign names, programs, forms, etc.). At this level, the amount of effort against a timeline is also necessary to share, ensuring that the right amount of resourcing and budget are available against scope.

Project Team check-ins are even more detailed, which may include walking through a detailed project plan, issue log, launch plans, etc.

4. What kind of information could be pushed and pulled?

Identifying project communication methods and tools as part of the communication plan is also important, so stakeholders are clear on which communications will be pushed and/or pulled.

Pushed communications refer to project information that is sent or “pushed” to the recipient.

Posting status reports on a project collaboration tool or sending them via email is an easy way to push communications to an audience. This provides a method where internal and/or external project members can easily be notified how the project is progressing related to schedule, budget, and scope.

Pull communication on the other hand allows an audience to review and “pull” information, as if self-service style. There may be an available project status dashboard that is auto populated with data, or an active project plan that’s view-only to see status of fast moving tasks over time.

5. What kind of decisions are needed per audience?

While the framework of a communication plan can be built from the above questions, establishing some kind of decision tree is also helpful when important decisions are needed on a project. Let’s say that the Project Team identified a major issue in the testing phase or a new compliance directive was recently shared which requires rework of forms, landing pages, etc.

Knowing who gets to decide on important decisions helps the Project Manager give the Project Team direction when to continue and log it for a future fix/project, or to completely stop and start the change order process if the scope change will create a significant impact to budget and/or schedule.

After answering these questions, the Project Manager will have a clear communication plan that may look like this:

Name	Description	Frequency	Audience	Notes
Steering Committee	Executive level project status updates	Quarterly	Vice President and Directors	Presentation of summary project health report
Core Team Check-in	High-level project status updates	Every two weeks	Project Sponsors and Project Leads	Project status on milestones, including any decisions needed impacting scope, budget, and schedule
Internal Status Check-in	Internal Project Team sync on project status: completed, upcoming, roadblocks	Every week	Project Team	Detailed level of tasks, status, and addressing any roadblocks or decision needed by Core Team
Project Status Reporting	Written project status	Every two weeks	Steering Committee, Core Team, Project Team	Emailed project status report
Project Collaboration	Microsoft Teams	As needed	Core Team, Project Team	Project documentation, channels, chat, etc.