Introduction

Lola arrived late for our dinner meeting. She was flustered as she whirled into the restaurant. She had made the critical mistake of answering her telephone just before leaving the office. The person on the other end of the line treated Lola to a twenty minute lecture on why her project was destined to fail and why it should not have been approved in the first place.

What Lola found most upsetting about this person’s diatribe was that it was filled with misinformation and incorrect assumptions. This has happened to me once or twice. I listen to someone’s opinion about the project and wonder whether we are discussing the same project. Maybe this is an experience that you share. My advice in this article is to never answer the phone just before leaving the office for the day!

That may sound facetious, and of course, it is. But it does raise the issue of good communication – a critical aspect of any project.

Challenges of Project Communications

Communication is fundamental to smoothly delivering a project. I would daresay that this truism is even more important in the not-for-profit sector. Not-for-profit projects often involve multiple stakeholders, several organizations, and several funders – making good communication even more critical. Lola discovered that inadequate communication leads to misinformation and potentially project failure. At the very least, it leads to much unnecessary grief.

Who, What, and How to Communicate

The first step in successful communications is identifying (and documenting, of course) with whom you will be communicating, what you will be communicating, and how you will be communicating. This is commonly known as “stakeholder analysis” and leads into the “communications plan”.

The stakeholder analysis should include:

Who

• Who are the stakeholders of the project?
• These will include not only the funders, directors, and other VIPs, but also the project team, customers of the project (i.e. those who will benefit from or use whatever the project produces).
• In Lola’s project, the stakeholders form quite a long list. They include funders, executive director, project team, fundraising division, donors whose names appear in the database, the board, people who are going to use the database, and other people who have a stake in the project outcomes.

  What

• What are you going to communicate?
• Not all stakeholders are interested in the same thing. Identify their specific issues and concerns. This should be completed for each stakeholder group.
• Lola decided that the funders should be involved in scoping the project. After the project began, she decided that they should also know about the budget and how the project was progressing at a high level. The project team needed much more detailed information on the project’s progression.

  How

• How are you going to communicate with them? How frequently will it occur? Will it be documented or verbal?
• Communication can take many forms, and they all have a specific purpose. Written reports or notes are best for official communication, and to retain a history of the project. Oral communication, such as status meetings or information discussions, are best for the daily activity of getting the project done. Pamphlets or brochures would be best for peripheral stakeholders or marketing purposes.
• Lola decided that she would send biweekly status reports to the project team. These were a one-page list of the deliverables that had been produced during the previous two-week period, the general activities that people were conducting, and any serious issues that arose. This report would have been far too much detail for the funder, so she submitted quarterly reports of about five pages that identified key activities and deliverables, changes to the project scope, whether the project was on budget and schedule, and any issues that arose and how she dealt with them.

After Lola did her analysis, she developed a communications plan that started like this:

Stakeholder	Format	Goal	Information included	Responsible	Frequency
Project Team	Status report	Review project activities and deliverables	Activities during previous two weeks Deliverables achieved during previous two weeks Issues affecting project performance	Lola	Bi-weekly
	Status meeting	Review project status and discuss issues arising	Project plan and budget Status report Key issues arising Review of project risks	Lola	Every three weeks
Board of Directors	Update at monthly board meeting	Raise awareness about the project and conduct high-level update	High-level update on budget and progress Project successes	Executive Director to deliver; Lola to write	Monthly

 

The Communications Balance

You do not want too much of a good thing. Despite the necessity of communications, do not go overboard! Eventually, people will just start tuning you out and fail to pay attention to even the important things. Communications that are long and frequent often go unread. Status meetings that last for hours quickly become tedious. Appropriate communications will take some practice, but it is an art that you should definitely practice.

Summary

Lola received that dreaded phone call from a stakeholder who felt it was her duty to lecture Lola on all the problems with the project. More to the point, much of it was based on incorrect assumptions and misinformation. This was the result of inadequate communication with the relevant stakeholders. I suggested that Lola create and execute a more rigorous communications plan that included the who, what, and how of communicating.

Developing and executing a communications plan is not the silver bullet against such situations. I am sometimes surprised when presenting the project status at a meeting and someone gives me his or her interpretation afterwards. I say, “going well, but some issues.” They hear, “the Titanic is sinking.” Adequate communications will not solve every problem, but will greatly reduce the frequency of those dreaded end-of-day phone calls and keep the project trudging along.

Blair Witzel (blair@mcdoane.com) is a member of the Project Management Institute and a consultant with McDonnell Doane + Associates, an information management and technology firm focusing on the not-for-profit and public sectors. His work centres on managing multi-project portfolios and working with organizations to develop project management methodologies to more effectively deliver projects.