Grace PM Academy · Module 6 · Live Discussion Summary

Where the Room Started

The feedback pointed at one thing. Client decisions.

This week’s survey was open ended on purpose. Communication planning has no standard form to test against, so the questions asked how you plan your communication today. One theme came back louder than everything else.

On cadence“Time is wasted in a lot of meetings due to the wrong cadence.”

A meeting schedule gets set at the start of a project and then held forever, whatever the work is doing that week.

On documentation“A conversation without a written decision really hasn’t ended. The ending has just been postponed.”

Communication exists to produce action. If you cannot point to a decision, a document, or work that started because of it, the conversation is still open.

On frequency“Project communication frequency is not linear, but dynamic.”

A slow week and a peak week should not carry the same meeting schedule. The cost of a team working in the wrong direction rises with the amount of work in play.

On latency“The latency around such decisions is entirely arbitrary, unknowable, and frustrating.”

Arbitrary means it has no logical basis. Unknowable means you are powerless against it. The room tested all 3 words later in the hour.

That last line set the agenda. The whole session ran on one question: if a client is slow to decide, how much of that is actually inside a project manager’s control?

What the Room Already Does

Five practices, already running on Grace projects

The floor opened with a direct question. How do you request, document, and manage your client’s decision process today? Five answers came back, all from live work.

1
Build the schedule first, then back the meetings out of itSet the consultant deadlines, then issue a schedule that carries the meeting dates for every phase. Split the meetings by consultant group so nobody sits through an hour with nothing in it for them. Agendas say what gets covered. Minutes carry action items with an owner and a due date, and the PM follows up before the date arrives.
2
Name every decision maker on day oneThe kickoff runs long on purpose. Build a project roster with the point person for each discipline, the point person to the executive team, and the point people for each end user group. Color code the meeting windows in the schedule, and title each meeting with what gets reviewed in it.
3
Get a signature at each phase gateSign off at schematic design freezes the plan. Sign off at design development freezes the systems. Both are presented with the same terms attached. A change after this point adds a stated amount of time and a stated amount of fee.
4
Learn the client’s behavior and plan around itOne client could not decide inside a meeting. The answer given in the room always changed, and the real one arrived by phone within 48 hours. The team stopped fighting it and built the 2 day lag into the cadence.
5
Start inside your own teamKnow what your consultants need and when they need it. Light fixtures, plumbing fixtures, access control locations. Ask the client for their standards at the front of the phase, while the electrical and technology sheets are still weeks out.

The first meeting sets the tone for everything after it.

Two people made that point independently, an hour apart. The kickoff is where the rules of engagement get set, and where the client decides how seriously to take them.

The Case With No Clean Answer

Sometimes the end date will not move

Education work carries a fixed opening date. School starts whether or not the decisions arrived on time. One participant named the bind plainly, and it did not get resolved on the call.

The constraintNothing downstream can absorb a late decision

The schedule has no float at the back end. A decision that slips has to come out of somewhere, and the team is often uneasy about raising that with the client.

The partial fixWrite every open question into a matrix and take it to the OAC

Log each question, bring it to the owner, architect, and contractor meeting, and hold it open until it gets an answer. Not every question makes the list, so the schedule still needs contingency.

The room agreed on the timing, if nothing else. The conversation about what happens when a decision runs late belongs at the kickoff, before the first one is late.

The Idea on the Table

One firm gave up on planning tasks and planned the decisions

A firm a little larger than Grace hit the same wall. Every project unfolds differently, so a single uniform planning process felt out of reach. They agreed on one thing instead. The speed and timing of decisions sets how fast the work can move.

List every decision the phase needs

Name who makes each one, and in what order

Put the whole list on the table at the kickoff

They stopped scheduling who does what when, and scheduled the decisions instead. Their clients started asking why nobody else did this. A first time client could look at the sheet and see what the design team would need, and when, long before anyone asked for it.

The room named the collaborative version of this within seconds. Pull planning. Everybody in one room with sticky notes, working backwards from the opening date until every decision point is on the wall. It runs 6 to 8 hours on a large project. The output lands on a Miro board, a Smartsheet, or a tool like Asana or Monday.

Two people who have run pull plans agreed on this: no 2 sessions ever go the same way. The concept holds anyway. Start at the end date, work backwards, and expect step 2 to surface 100 things nobody saw coming.

The Open Question

Has anybody written it down?

One question stopped the room. If you have never led that process, is there a document you can pick up and run? Say the client is more complex than anything you have handled before. Where is the playbook? The answers were honest and incomplete.

1
A standard exists outside the firmPull planning comes out of lean construction and has a standardized document behind it. Nobody on the call was working from a Grace version of it.
2
The roadmaps committee is building one nowA rubric that runs the whole project phase by phase, covering when things need to occur and where the documents live. That work is underway.
3
Two people said they would write theirs downBoth run a version of this process on real projects today. Both said out loud that it lives in their head and should be on paper.

Worth tracking. A process that only lives with the people who invented it cannot be handed to a PM running their first complex project.

The Reframe

Information is the critical path

Most planning methods come out of construction, where the design is finished before the work starts. Design runs on a different constraint. You need information from other people before you can move, and the primary source of frustration is waiting for it.

Best case, and it never happens

The client hands you a sheet with every question you will ask and every answer, before you start. Put your head down and work.

Workable, and this is the target

Read the whole phase. List what you will need and when. Ask early enough that the answer arrives before the work reaches it.

The default, when nobody plans

Work, work, work, hit a step where you are stuck, ask for the thing, and then wait.

Communication planning is the work of closing that gap.

You cannot ask in advance for something you have not thought about yet. So the plan starts by reading the whole phase, then works backwards to the dates you have to make the requests on.

One working example came up. A PM built an assistant that reads the project schedule, finds the next client touchpoint on the calendar, and drafts the request. It tells them what to ask for at that touchpoint based on what the schedule says the team is working on now. They still review every draft and check it against the project. What went away was the job of remembering.

The Test

Is decision latency really unknowable?

The room got asked directly. Frustrating? Everyone would vote yes. Unknowable? The answer came back in under a second, and it was no. So the follow up went to the floor. What would you tell a colleague who believes it cannot be known?

Work backwards from the deliverableEvery document tells you what it needs and who has to answer

If a set has to be issued on a fixed day, the review has to sit with the client before that. Those dates are knowable at the start of the phase, and so is the list of questions the set depends on.

Accept the gapYou will not forecast all of it

Things surface mid phase that nobody saw at the start. The bulk of what a document set needs is predictable, and the bulk is the part worth planning.

Module 6 has a tool for exactly this. The Communication Planner calculates a request by date from a decide by date and the client’s observed decision latency. That calculation is what turns latency from a feeling into a number.

Starting the Conversation

Read the client before you set the rules

A large institutional client may already have a committee, a process, and written standards that answer the question for you. A church building committee doing its one and only project has none of that and needs the whole thing explained. Opening a kickoff with a 9 minute speech on the importance of decisions lands well with exactly one of them.

Bring optionsGood, better, and best beats an open question

Offer 2 or 3 ways the decision process could run and ask which one they prefer. “Golly, what do you think” hands the problem back to the client and usually returns nothing useful.

Hold the line the first timeThe first invoice is what proves you meant it

If you said a change after sign off adds time and fee, charge it the first time it happens. Skip it once and you can spend the rest of the relationship paying for that.

Aim for durabilityA commitment that gets undone was never an agreement

The rules of engagement can differ from project to project. The outcome should be the same every time. Everybody understands how it works, and everybody follows it.

One comparison from the room: lawyers are not shy about billing for additional service. Design work is thought driven and its scope blurs easily, which makes the follow through matter even more.

Take It With You

Module 6 already carries part of the playbook

The room asked whether any of this is written down. For Grace projects, some of it is. Two tools in this module do the work the session described, and both are open now.

The tools

Plan the touchpoints, then run them

The Communication Planner turns a work plan into dated touchpoints and calculates how far ahead each request has to go out. The Quick Reference Guide is the one page job aid for the rules behind it.

Communication Planner Quick Reference Guide

What they cover

3 triggers . place every touchpoint against work intensity, a coordination milestone, or a client decision point.
The request by date . calculated from a decide by date and the client’s observed decision latency.
Touchpoint density . set against the effort curve, sized by counting the parties who have to coordinate directly.
The escalation ladder . what to do when the answer does not arrive.

The Takeaway

Know what you need, when you need it, and how far ahead to ask for it

Communication planning sets when the team talks, who is in the room, what gets covered, and what each party is expected to do inside that hour. For the owner the expectation is plain. Contribute, tell us what you think, and decide. The job of the design team is to put them in a position to decide comfortably and with confidence.

1
Try one thing this weekTake your next client touchpoint. Write down what the schedule says your team will be working on 2 weeks after it, and what has to be decided for that work to move. Bring that list to the touchpoint.
2
Module 7 opens FridayHow to run a great kickoff meeting. It picks up the thread this session left open, since the kickoff is where the rules of engagement get set.
3
Module 8 comes after thatManaging execution. That makes 2 more weekly group sessions before the schedule changes.
4
BST training part 2 returns between modules 8 and 9The technical session picks up where part 1 left off, then the weekly cohort sessions resume.