Sep 1: Understanding where you’re starting from

Delving into your communication activities to date, how effective they’ve been and what you can do differently to increase stakeholder support

• Diagnosing where you are starting from – what’s been done by whom, how, when, where and why; what worked and didn’t
• Analysing how you want communications to add value to your project
• Surfacing strategies to unearth the risks so you can make communications work in practice

Step 2: Understanding who your key audiences are

Considering your key stakeholders’ orientations to the world, their perceptions of your project, the outcomes they expect and the power they have to influence your success

• Discovering how much they know and how they feel about your project
• Segmenting them according to their impact on your project
• Deciding how involved you want them to be and making it happen

Step 3: Clarifying communication objectives for your project

Determining communication objectives that will support your overall project aims; ensuring they are relevant and helpful

• What’s the bottom line – linking comms activities to your overall project aims - revenues, market share, CSR, et al
• Funnelling down to the heart of the problem and identifying the best possible activities and outcomes
• How to create specific communication objectives you can measure

Step 4: Deciding the key things to communicate

Understanding the tangible and intangible things that determine whether your audiences will pay attention to and act on the information your provide

• Identifying the key messages about your project you want to get across and that convince people to get involved
• Tailoring plans and activities to your audiences’ concerns so they feel your project is relevant to them
• Creating messages that have credibility with your audiences and that they understand

Step 5: Creating a balanced portfolio of communication channels

Having a range of face2face, print, online and multimedia options you can use to reach each of your audiences in a cost-effective and timely way

• Evaluating the pros & cons of communication channels available and choosing the ones that work best for your project
• Creating a portfolio of channels that balances cost and production timescales to most effectively reach  audiences
• Helping your team members produce appealing activities using a mix of face2face, print, online and multimedia channels

Step 6: Creating a practical schedule of activities your team can implement

Simple ways of documenting project communication plans and activities so team members and sponsors understand who does what and by when

• Choosing activities you can deliver with the resources you have in your team and organisation
  
• Determining achievable timescales that are also flexible and help rather than constrain your team
• Allocating responsibility for each stage of delivery to ensure an activity happens and meets the objectives you set for it

Step 7: Creating clear content that has impact

Tips and techniques you and your team members can use to quickly create content for communication activities that will be easy for audiences to understand and respond to

• Developing credible content that changes views and persuades people to act
• Creating an easy-to-read and understand information pack for a consistent view of your project
• Some golden rules for successful writing that are amazingly simple

Step 8: Using social media effectively

Introducing social media into your project for improving relationships between team members and with other stakeholders

• Dealing with the fear of losing control and other concerns that hold people back from social media
• Choosing the apps that  are most relevant to your project and your audiences - and work with your company's systems
• Using social media to improve collaboration within the project team

What I do is all about HR change and transformation, we can’t achieve very much if we don’t communicate. I had high-level understanding, through your system I also have the detail and how to stitch communication activities together.

Typically I work with top teams who often want their internal communicators to sell the change internally. Now I can ask the right questions and guide them.

You’ve made me aware of my skill deficiencies but I don’t feel threatened. Instead I feel it is something I can cope with and develop.

Christine Bennett
Senior HR manager, public sector

Thank you for what you share in this system. My overall awareness of communication in all forms has increased and I’m less afraid of social media. The writing step I found very interesting. I’m now more purposeful in my communication with peers and upper management, and able to be more considerate of them.

Elaine Tomkinson
Associate director, Eisai

The level of detail in the Communicating Projects System is excellent. It really encourages the user to not only assess all aspects of their existing communication, but also record it and objectively review how effective it is.

The action planning at the end of each module consolidates what’s been identified, giving the possibility to prioritise and check progress.

In projects there can be a lot of duplication when it comes to communication plans and activities. I think your system will help many people streamline both to be far more effective with their messages and efficient in the use of their’s and other people’s time.

Deanne Earle
Project delivery specialist, founder Unlike Before Ltd
www.unlikebefore.com

You may be wondering what qualifies me to create this system, so let me tell you a little about myself...

I'm a chartered marketer, trained journalist and corporate communications consultant, plus I run marketing and PR training courses around the world.

Typically I'm called in when complex projects hit problems and the team realises they no longer have the support of their end users and executives. I help them work out what has gone wrong and how to win back support, before the project restarts.

Projects include CRM rollouts, business process re-engineering, office relocations, redeployment, technology rollouts, brand makeovers and culture change.

In 2010 I was asked to provide communications support to four much smaller projects. They helped me realise I had developed a system that works for projects of all sizes. It doesn't matter about the communication skills within the team or management style of leaders.

Since then I've been documenting this system so others can use it also. Communicating Projects is the result. It pulls together all my experiences – working in-house, working as a consultant and delivering professional training programmes.