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Lab 12 — Preparing a Communication Plan

At a glance

Learning objectives

By the end of this lab you should be able to:

  1. Build a communication plan that names audience, content, cadence, channel, and owner.
  2. Choose a channel deliberately and justify it against a rejected alternative.
  3. Calculate the true cost of a communication plan in person-hours.
  4. Prune a plan that has grown, and explain why removing a report is a decision rather than a neglect.
  5. Write a status report that separates fact, assessment, and request.

Scenario

This lab continues the Public Service Complaint Management System from Lab 02: citizens lodge complaints about municipal services by web form or phone, complaints are routed to five municipal departments, and the public sees aggregate volumes by district. The launch date is a public political commitment, fourteen months out.

The project is currently described as "well communicated" by its sponsor, which in practice means:

Existing practice Cadence Participants
Written status note to all stakeholders Weekly 1 hour to write; 12 recipients spend ~10 minutes each
Steering committee meeting Fortnightly 6 attendees for 1.5 hours, plus 1 hour of preparation
Municipal department briefing Monthly 1 hour of preparation; 8 attendees for 30 minutes
Team check-in Daily, verbal 9 people for 15 minutes

Other facts:

  • The delivery team is split across two cities: five people at the provincial IT office and four at the contractors' office, with a two-hour daily overlap.
  • The provincial IT department has a two-month approval queue for security architecture, and it responds to written submissions only.
  • One municipal department has publicly objected to "being monitored".
  • The auditor general will assess whether complaints are resolved within published service levels.
  • Citizens are the end users, and the launch will be announced publicly.
  • In the last three months, the monthly department briefing has not produced a single decision, a change, or a recorded action.

Your role

You are the project manager. The sponsor has asked you to review communication and report back with a plan — including what you propose to stop doing. That last part is the assignment, not an afterthought.

Project information and assumptions

The scenario is part of the example-project library — read the full description there if you want the wider context.

  • The two-hour daily overlap is the only synchronous window across the whole team; use it deliberately.
  • Assume the weekly status note currently reaches all twelve recipients, and that roughly half read it fully.
  • Treat the approval queue as a communication relationship with its own channel and lead time.
  • Assume no additional administrative support is available.

Tasks

Task 1 — Identify audiences, not individuals

Group the stakeholders into no more than six audiences who need the same information at the same cadence. Name each audience and list who is in it.

Two audiences that are often merged must be kept separate: the people who decide, and the people who must change how they work. Explain why merging them is a mistake.

Task 2 — Build the communication plan

Complete a table with one row per audience:

Audience What they need When Channel Owner

Then, for three rows, justify your channel choice by naming the alternative you rejected and why. At least one justification must involve the two-city split.

Task 3 — Calculate the cost

Using the figures given, calculate the total person-hours per week consumed by the existing practices. Show the working for each line.

Then express the total as a fraction of one full-time equivalent, using a 40-hour week, and answer:

  1. Is that fraction acceptable? Under what condition would it be?
  2. Which line costs the most, and is its cost visible to the people paying it?

Task 4 — Prune the plan

Using the evidence given, decide what to change:

Practice Keep / change / stop Justification

For any practice you propose to stop, write the one-paragraph notice you would send, explaining what is stopping and why. State explicitly what people should do if they still want the information.

Then answer: what is the risk of stopping a report without telling anyone, and what is the risk of keeping every report ever requested?

Task 5 — Design the decision speed

The steering committee meets fortnightly. Two decisions in the coming months are needed faster than that: approving a change to the appointment rules, and approving the security architecture submission.

For each, state:

  1. How the decision will be made if it cannot wait for the next meeting.
  2. Who holds that authority, and what the limits of it are.
  3. What is recorded afterwards, and where.

Then write one sentence explaining what happens to a communication plan when cadence is slower than decision speed.

Task 6 — Write the status report

The security architecture submission was lodged four weeks ago. The queue is two months. Assume the submission was accepted but the review has not begun.

Write a status report to the steering committee, no longer than 200 words, structured as:

  • Fact — what is objectively known
  • Assessment — what it means for the schedule, with a number
  • Request — the decision or action you need, and by when

Do not soften the assessment and do not editorialise. If the schedule is affected, say by how much.

Deliverable

  1. Six audiences named, with the decision-makers and the workflow-changers kept separate.
  2. The completed communication plan table, with three justified channel choices.
  3. The communication cost calculation, expressed in person-hours per week and as a fraction of an FTE, with the two answers from Task 3.
  4. The pruning table and the notice for anything you stop.
  5. The decision-speed design for the two fast decisions.
  6. A 200-word status report with fact, assessment, and request.

Hints and guidance

  • Cadence follows decision speed, not habit. A monthly report about a weekly decision is a delay with a schedule attached.
  • Reading time is a cost too. Count it. A report nobody reads is pure cost; a report everybody skims is a smaller cost with the same benefit problem.
  • Written channels are not inferior. For the approval queue and the two-city split, written is the only medium that reaches everyone at once and leaves a record.
  • A report that produces no decision is a candidate for removal. Test each line: what decision would change if this stopped?
  • Stopping something requires telling people. Silence is read as a problem, not as a saving.

Self-check criteria

Check How to verify it
Six audiences or fewer Decision-makers and workflow-changers are separate rows
Every plan row has all five fields No row is missing a channel or an owner
Three channel choices justified Each names the rejected alternative
Cost arithmetic shown line by line Reading time included, not just writing time
FTE fraction stated Person-hours ÷ 40, with an interpretation
Pruning is evidence-based At least one practice changed or stopped, citing the evidence given
Status report separates the three parts Fact, assessment, and request are each identifiable
Assessment contains a number A schedule effect in days or weeks, not an adjective

Reflection

  1. Which audience is hardest to communicate with, and what does the difficulty come from?
  2. You probably kept the weekly status note. What would have to be true for you to stop it?
  3. The two-hour overlap is scarce. Which of your synchronous activities deserves it most?
  4. The department briefing produced no decision for three months. Was it useless, or was it used for something other than decisions? How would you find out before cutting it?
Check your arithmetic

Person-hours per week for the existing practices:

Practice Working Person-hours per week
Weekly status note 1 h writing + (12 × 10 min = 2 h) reading = 3 h/week 3.0
Steering committee (6 × 1.5 h) + 1 h prep = 10 h per fortnight → 5 h/week 5.0
Department briefing 1 h prep + (8 × 0.5 h = 4 h) = 5 h per month → 5 ÷ 4.33 ≈ 1.15 h/week 1.15
Daily team check-in 9 × 15 min = 2.25 h/day × 5 = 11.25 h/week 11.25
Total ≈ 20.4 hours per week

20.4 ÷ 40 ≈ 0.51 FTE — roughly half of one person's entire working week, spent on communication about the work rather than the work.

Full working, including the reading-time treatment and the pruning analysis, is in the Intermediate labs answer key.

Extension challenge

Redesign the communication plan for a three-city team with no shared working hours at all, keeping the total cost at or below 0.35 FTE. State what you removed, what you replaced it with, and the one thing you would refuse to give up even though it is expensive. Then write the paragraph you would send the sponsor explaining why a lower communication cost is not automatically better.