Anyone wanting to set-up a project should consider Project Governance as one of the top 10 tasks to complete early on in the Projects Initiation Phase. A project manager must have key stakeholders identified and integrated into an organisational governance structure that will allow the project to be steered to success. Governance Organisations make key decisions and is a place where risks and issues can be effectively mitigated and resolved.
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What this is
A communications plan is possibly one of the most important project management documents. This document details how you and your team will communicate important information during the projects life cycle to your various stake holders (status, meetings, issues and , deliverables). This document will include details of your stakeholders and their relative importance in terms of influence and need for information.
Why it’s useful
A Communication Plan will detail what communication channels can be used (email, intranet, meetings) and who and how often varous stakeholders will receive such communications. Good communication delivered in the right form and at a frequency relevant to a stakeholders levels of influence and involvement in your project is key to getting stakeholder engagment.
No communications plan often means NO engagement.
How to use it
Use the outline in the sample document to create a communication plan for your project. The amount of communication may vary depending on the size of your team, number of stakeholders and the complexity of your project. One of the most important things to do before completing this document is to analyze your stakeholders. Identify who they are and match them to the communications channel and frequency of communication necessary for their successful engagement. One way to do this is to use a Stakeholder Interest Map and to develop this as part of a workshop with your team and perhaps your project board. This communications plan is one of the very best templates available on the internet.
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Once you start implementing risk and issue management for yourself you soon realise that week by week snap shots of your project /programmes risk and issue logs have their limitations. At some point you will want to identify and report on long term risk and issue management trends which are proven early warning indicators of future project /programme success or failure.
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I was recently in great need of Business Case Template for a project I am running. However, after looking through my own template library and those available for download on the net (Free and Pay per download) I came to the view that none of them were up to scratch. I therefore spent the best part of a weekend putting together what I hope will be one of the best Business Case Template around. The key features which make this template a real alternative to the others I have seen is that it incorporates the following added features:-
- Incorporates links wherever possible to explain complex subjects.
- Incorporates links to other templates which are inserted into this document. This is especially useful when it comes to the financial analysis aspects of this document where the effort can be enormous building and populating your own analysis tools.
- Includes Earned Value Profile for those who want a business case which is on constant review (Gateway Reviews)
- Includes Benefits catalogue and associated benefit valuations
- Uses the Rate of Return on Investment (ROI) approach to rating a projects chances of sign-off. Calculations take into account benefits with filtering capability to show the investment from an optimistic /likely or pessimistic view point.
- The document also has a more complex set of sign-off pages which take into account the complex nature most sign-offs and more importantly ensuring stakeholder buy-in.
- This template includes an Executive Summary and a Project Brief section for those projects which are perhaps more fleshed out than others at the business case stage.
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So what is an Inter Project Dependency (IPD)?
It is where Projects become so intertwined that one portion of one project cannot begin or be continued unless a part of another project has been completed.
Alternatively, it can be described as the relationship between a key event in a Controlling project and another key event in a Dependent project.
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