1 Huge Reason to Communicate Your Plan
The purpose of this blog article is to cover why it is important to your project to communicate your plan.
Communication is in the LEAD domain, under the People segment in the Project Management MPM model.
Communication is in the LEAD domain, under the People segment in the Project Management MPM model
You Need to Communicate Your Plan
Communicating your plan to project stakeholders, such as your project sponsor, team and technical staff, is as important as building the plan itself.
When you share your plan with your stakeholders, they can provide input and help make sure your plan is comprehensive, and without any gaps.
Share your plan with your stakeholders
Try to get into the habit of repeating this cycle: gather information, create/update plan, share the plan, get feedback, revise plan, and repeat. You might need to cycle through this weekly, or even daily during periods of change, but it’s vital that you adapt your plan over time.
It is important to stress how critical it is that you frequently communicate and share your plan.
The plan is your sophisticated to-do list. It shows the steps you intend to take to get to the final destination, to complete the final deliverables. The clearer and cleaner you make this and the more you discuss with your project team and key stakeholders and business leaders, the more likely you will find missing items and holes that need plugging or bridges required where none existed.
Recently I took over a project with no documented plan, where task assignments were by verbal discussion about what had to be done next. That is how the team meeting ended, a verbal discussion about who was doing what, with no supporting plan.
I had to stop and give my head a shake, because it was hard to fathom that some PMs still operate this way. The cold reality is that there are probably a lot of PMs who work like this, by doing things on the fly without ongoing documentation and long-term planning.
Describing a sequenced set of steps, including dependencies, identifying durations, and which resources are doing the work is such a fundamental prerequisite to good planning that it seems odd when this doesn’t exist in a project where a group of people is involved in getting a common set of tasks accomplished.
Sometimes the PM just doesn’t know how to start so they don’t have anything; or sometimes they are afraid of criticism, so they avoid sharing any kind of plan they have.
However, you feel about it, some kind of plan is needed —even a rudimentary set of steps is helpful. Share your plan with your team; otherwise, how do they know what everyone is working towards? More importantly, without it you miss out on getting their feedback.
The plan is like a sophisticated, shared to-do list
A plan shows a sequenced set of steps involving multiple people and interdependencies amongst the steps.
Each person who has a set of steps to accomplish is able to provide feedback on whether their steps are accurate, whether their task’s predecessors or successors are correct, and how long the step are expected to take.
Sharing the plan with the team to get input, provides a valuable opportunity for identifying missing steps that if not included can jeopardize the project’s success.
In the PM role, you may not know the amount of time it takes your team members to accomplish a certain task, education need to get up to speed, or operational responsibilities, or coordination needed with other business areas. These all have the potential to introduce additional time into your timeline.
Your team members are much more cognizant of their responsibilities and time demands, and their input helps ensure the project’s timelines are realistic.
The continual cycle for the project plan then is:
- Outline known steps and gather relevant facts
- Produce a current plan
- Share and communicate this plan with those who have ownership—whether technical or business stakeholders
- Identify missing pieces and steps
- Incorporate those into the plan
- Repeat the cycle again
This cycle is repeated weekly and sometimes daily. But a critical part of the cycle is getting feedback and corrections from stakeholders and that can only happen if the plan is shared with them on regular basis.
Summary
It is critically important to your project’s success to communicate your plan.
Think of it like a shared, sophisticated to-do list. When you share your plan with your stakeholders, they can provide input and help make sure your plan is comprehensive, and without any gaps.
Develop a repeating cycle: gather information, create/update plan, share the plan, get feedback, revise plan, and repeat.
This cycle is repeated weekly and sometimes daily. A critical part of the cycle is getting feedback and corrections from stakeholders and that can only happen if the plan is shared with them on regular basis.
Action Steps / Apply This Knowledge
- Develop steps for you to follow for a weekly cycle review of your project plan. Start with a written one, identifying people with whom to communicate and get feedback. After some time this might be second nature, but written helps in the beginning.
- Version your project plans and schedules week to week and compare from plans four or five weeks apart. You might be surprised at how much things change.
- During the project meeting, if a task is out of control, it is helpful to bring up old versions of the plan to demonstrate to the team, how things have progressed, in order to force decisions and closure for tasks that seem to be taking too long.
- Set up a routine for project plan communication in your Communications Plan and adjust depending on the frequency of changes and updates to the plan.
- Prompt engineering guidance for AI GPTs such as chatGPT: “I’m a business manager launching a project that is attempting to achieve outcomes related to X. What are some unique and innovative ways to communicate the plan and the approach my project is taking to engage with the different stakeholders?”
Learn More to Do More
Business evolves through change initiatives otherwise known as projects. The key to managing these change initiatives so you have more time, and less stress is to use simple strategies and tools.
Check out the Learning Hub’s other Articles with Actionable Steps, organized with a busy leader in mind, by topic or main idea, and with some AI GPT (e.g. ChatGPT) prompt engineering suggestions under the Action steps: https://simplepmstrategies.com/learning-hub-index
LEAD – You Need to Communicate Your Plan
© Simple PM Strategies 2024