Communication Planning

Every Tuesday at nine

You built a work plan in Module 5. It names the major work packages, assigns them to owners, estimates the hours for various staff, and creates logical linkages between tasks to ensure the Critical Path does not slip. In Module 7, you will lead two kickoff meetings where you share the plan and communicate expectations.

Module 6 is the part in between. It creates the communication rhythm and rules that will tie the plan to the actual work and keep the team moving in the same direction during the project.

Almost nothing in a communication plan is new. The places where the team needs working sessions, reviews, and decision dates are already in your work plan. Your job is to design the communication and the project's interactions according to where those items sit, put them on a calendar, and ensure the intensity of communication matches the intensity of work.

What you'll be able to do

• ✓Put every project touchpoint against one of 3 triggers, and drop the ones that answer to none.
• ✓Set communication density against the effort curve.
• ✓Work out a request by date from a decide by date and your client's answer time for major project decision.
• ✓Understand the 5 key conversations you lead during each project.

A fixed cadence is wrong in both directions

The majority of Project Managers start each project with a recurring calendar invite. That recurring calendar sets one communication rate and holds it for the entire phase. On Oakhaven, that means your Design Development check in happens the same way in Week 2, when 4 people are working and nothing's been decided, and in Week 11, when 14 people are working and 3 disciplines are waiting on the same answer.

That fixed cadence has the potential to hurt the project twice.

Early, the cadence produces meetings with little to decide, and your team may learn the meeting is optional. Then when the workload peaks, the same cadence delivers a fraction of what the work needs, and by then nobody takes it seriously.

Communication planning is about syncing the communication demand of the project to the calendar, and realizing that a fixed communication style is not appropriate when work is dynamic.

You can count it.

1. Open a work plan for a current project.
2. Identify a place in the project where a large amount of coordination will happen.
3. Count the dependencies that cross a discipline (the number of pieces of information that one discipline needs from others).
4. Then subtract the ones with a working session scheduled around them.

What's left is your debt for the phase. It's the number of major coordination items minus the number of coordination sessions to coordinate them.

It gets more expensive the longer it sits. A stale assumption caught in Week 8 costs you a small amount of rework. Caught in Week 14, it costs the rework, the consultant coordination to reissue, and whatever the schedule slip costs on top.

Three triggers put a touchpoint on the calendar

In recent years, the calendars of many Project Managers have become covered with meetings. It is a top complaint among AEC Project Managers and it contributes to feelings of stress and "I do not have enough time" that are widely reported in the field. The simplest first step for a Project Manager to create more time and space for themselves and better control their calendar is to become more intentional with how you schedule communication.

There are three main things that earn a slot on your calendar for a given project. These are not the only things, but these are a "Top 3" list.

Trigger 1. Work intensity

In a typical phase, effort starts slow while decisions are being made, climbs once the big decisions lock, then eases off as the work moves into review. Coordination follows that curve as a leading indicator, because it's a function of how many people are working and how many handoffs sit between them.

A best practice is to separate the communication plan for a phase into three zones:

1. Decision-focused touchpoints at the front, and go deep on them, because the decisions you make there set everything downstream. Record the decisions as they are made.
2. A regular set of coordination and workload management meetings through the middle, with dedicated work sessions for major coordination items.
3. Fewer communications near the end of the phase, where they shift from coordination toward review.
   • This is only possible if you are judicious with the first 2. If you are not, communication can pile up at the end of the phase.

That's the shape of communication during the project. Magnitude is a separate question, and it comes from how many parties must talk to each other directly. Projects with many staff or many consultants will have more complicated communication networks than smaller, less busy projects.

Trigger 2. Coordination milestone

A coordination milestone is any point where 2 or more disciplines have to trade information to keep the other party on track. Grace's coordination milestones are already in your work plan, inside the dependency links between tasks owned by different roles.

Finding them is mechanical and, with a high-quality plan, a relatively easy task. Find the places in the plan where any task has a predecessor that sits with another discipline, then put a working session at the handoff.

Working sessions are dedicated communications that aim to solve a specific problem, make a specific discipline-to-discipline decision, or finalize a specific component of the project. They are collaborative in nature, but still led by the Project Manager.

Trigger 3. Client decision point

A client decision point is any moment your client must make a choice or decision before the work continues. Strong Project Managers identify the date for each decision and then count backwards from that date to determine when the decision must be requested. To determine when you need to ask for decisions, the Project Manager must understand the client's decision latency.

Decision latency measures how long it takes a client to make a major decision. This timeframe can be procedural, such as when a board meets. It can be personal preference, meaning some people make decisions faster than others. The Project Manager should gather data about the client's decision process early so that they can plan the request by dates for major decisions.

Take the Oakhaven dispatch system selection. The console room package can't start until the vendor is selected, because the equipment sets the room dimensions, the power requirements and the clearances. That package starts in Week 11. Oakhaven's a new client, so the Project Manager's latency estimation came from Grace's experience on comparable municipal decisions, and it came out at 3 weeks. The request had to go out in Week 8, with options and a recommendation.

If it goes out in week 9 or week 10, we've put the project in a difficult position. The Communication Planning process identifies these key dates and then plans communication activities into the calendar to ensure they are met.

Build a great communication plan in six steps

Start from your Module 5 work plan. Everything you need is in it.

1. Plot the effort curve. Identify the places where major changes in effort occur.
2. Mark the coordination milestones. Identify dependencies that cross disciplines.
3. Set the decide by dates. Mark every client choice, then count backward from the task that depends on it.
4. Subtract the latency. Take your client's decision latency off each decide by date. That gives you the request by date, and that's the one that goes on the calendar.
5. Set the touchpoint density. Decide the minimum frequency you want to meet.
6. Publish the one-page plan. Identify the date, duration, participants, and purpose of each touch point, and document it on a one-page communication plan.

Step 6 gives you the page you present at kickoff. Module 7 covers how you introduce it and how you hold the team to it.

Put it to work