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Communications Plan

At a glance

  • Purpose: Decide in advance who needs which information, in what form and how often — and who escalates what, to whom, within how long.
  • Use it when: After the stakeholder register, before delivery starts. It is one of the most frequently skipped plans and one of the most frequently blamed after a failure.
  • Owner: The project manager.
  • Related: Module 10 · Lab 12

A communications plan decides, in advance, who needs which information, in what form, and how often. It prevents the two common failures: burying people in updates they do not need, and leaving key people uninformed until a problem is unavoidable.

Copy the skeleton below and replace the bracketed text.

Plan skeleton

# Communications Plan — [Project name]

| | |
| --- | --- |
| **Date** | [YYYY-MM-DD] |
| **Owner** | [Who] |

## Communication matrix

| Audience | Information | Format | Frequency | Owner | Channel |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| [Sponsor] | Progress, risks, decisions needed | Status report | [Fortnightly] | [PM] | [Email] |
| [Team] | Tasks, blockers | Stand-up | [Daily] | [PM] | [Meeting] |
| [Users] | What is changing and when | Release notes | [Per release] | [PM] | [Portal] |

## Escalation

| Situation | Escalate to | Within |
| --- | --- | --- |
| [Missed milestone] | [Sponsor] | [24 hours] |
| [Security concern] | [IT security lead] | [Immediately] |

## Meeting rhythm

| Meeting | Purpose | Attendees | Duration | Frequency |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| [Name] | [Purpose] | [Who] | [NN min] | [How often] |

## Ground rules

- [e.g. Decisions are recorded in writing within one working day.]
- [e.g. Anything that changes scope goes through the change process.]

How to use this template

  1. Start from the stakeholder register. Every high-influence stakeholder must appear, and the "what they need" column becomes the information column here.
  2. Match format to need. A sponsor usually wants a summary and a decision; the team needs detail and blockers; operations needs support implications. One format for everyone serves nobody.
  3. Name the sender, not just the channel. Unowned updates do not get sent, and unowned meetings do not get agenda items.
  4. Make escalation concrete: the trigger, the recipient, and the time limit. "Escalate when necessary" means different things to different people, which is discovered at the worst moment.
  5. Agree the meeting rhythm and the artefacts each meeting produces. A recurring meeting with no output decays into a status round-robin.
  6. Review it when the project changes phase. Communication needs at initiation and during hypercare are not the same.

Field descriptions

Field What goes in it Watch out for
Audience A named stakeholder or group "Everyone" as an audience
Information What they actually need What you would like to tell them
Format Report, meeting, dashboard, conversation Slides for a decision that needs a document
Frequency A cadence you can sustain Daily updates nobody reads
Owner (sender) Who produces and sends it The PM as sender of everything
Channel Email, portal, meeting, shared board Channels the audience does not use
Escalation trigger The observable condition "If things go wrong"
Escalation limit The time within which it must escalate Nothing, which means never

Worked example

From Lab 12, on the complaint-management system — invented for teaching:

Audience Information Format Frequency Owner
Service director (sponsor) Progress, top risks, decisions needed One-page dashboard Fortnightly PM
Departmental IT operations Support implications, environment needs, runbook Working session Monthly, plus on change Technical lead
Complaints officers What is changing, training dates, feedback route Workshop and pilot group At milestones Business analyst
Data protection officer Evidence of data handling at design and release Written review pack Twice PM
Situation Escalate to Within
A milestone will be missed by more than 5 days Sponsor 24 hours of the forecast being known
A suspected data-protection issue Data protection officer and sponsor Immediately
A change request exceeding delegated authority Sponsor At the next change meeting, or immediately if the work is blocked

Note that the escalation rows specify a time limit and a threshold, and the review row for the data protection officer specifies two moments rather than a frequency. Both changes come from the same principle: the plan should be checkable. "Keep the DPO informed" cannot be verified and therefore cannot be missed — which is exactly why it is a bad entry.

Common mistakes

  • Starting from a blank page instead of the stakeholder register. The result omits high-influence people and over-serves the ones already engaged.
  • Frequency without an owner. A schedule of updates that nobody produces is a wish list.
  • Vague escalation. Without a trigger, recipient, and limit, escalation happens late or not at all.
  • Verbal decisions. Most "but we agreed…" disputes start in a corridor conversation; record decisions in the decision log.
  • Over-communicating. Daily updates to a sponsor train them to stop reading, and the message that matters is lost in the noise.
  • One channel for everyone. Some stakeholders will not use the tool you chose, and they will not tell you — they will simply be uninformed.
  • Never revisited. The plan should change when the project changes phase or a stakeholder's attitude changes.