A Communication Plan

Communication is the key element to successful management and leadership. There is nothing else more important. Let me illustrate:

“I’m running a project that changes the e-mail infrastructure for our organisation.”

That little sentence is loaded with assumptions and uses a language that is convenient for me and not for my audience. Let’s look at it in some detail:

• Who knows what “e-mail infrastructure” means? –> IT technical minded people, geeks and nerds. In other words I’m talking a language that the people understand who are doing the job.
• I’m using e-mail, says the salesman, what does it mean for me?
• When is it happening?
• What is actually changing?

You can easily see that list of questions will grow quite quickly. And those questions are fantastic. You need them to create a good communication plan.

How to communicate Change

For the last week I’ve been thinking about a couple of ideas for my blog. Nothing stood out and then I received an unexpected email from Google:

Now, I’m used to read Google’s blog where they announce upcoming changes. But this one is different. It’s for me the first time that I pro-actively get a “personal” email from Google announcing an upcoming change. I’m not going to discuss or analyse the change content itself but like to look at the way it is communicated.

Making it easy to do business with you

Intro

2 years ago I was leading a project that brought significant change to the organisation. We embarked on a journey of improving internal collaboration. There were a myriad of different use cases albeit 2 came up over and over again.

• information exchange across departments was limited and across geographical boundaries very rare
• finding relevant information “hey, I know we have done something like that before. Let me think who was involved.” was challenging

“Standard” – I’m a bit sarcastic with a decent pinch of truth” –  ICT approach of building a new system and assume people will come and use it was out of the question. Standard ICT practice of centralised management and administration was also a no-go. Empowered employees are engaged employees was the mantra.