How will your project impact your company?

Projects are not done in a vacuum, everything impacts everything else to a greater or lesser degree. Determine how your project will impact the organization.

• Projects impact & are impacted by the organization’s functions, culture, maturity, and current performance.

• Very often project teams focus only on the groups that will be directly impacted by a given project

• Implementing change in one group will have a ripple effect throughout the company

• Be aware of and identify the more subtle impacts of your project across the organization that may determine project success or failure

• Implementing change that is not congruent with the organization’s culture and the maturity of its business functions will not be sustainable.

• Implementing solutions that require collaboration within a top down closed culture will not be successful.

• Implementing rigid top down solutions within a collaborative culture will not work.

• Successful projects produce deliverables as well as the desirable behavior using the deliverables.

• Changing the behavior requires communication training, coaching, monitoring, and follow-up.

• Identify the training and coaching that will be required along with the target audience and estimated timing for the training

• Communication, training, and coaching can be individual deliverables or work packages within another deliverable.

• Projects create change, identify who needs to be aware of the change, i.e. who's the target audience / audiences for project

• Consider two types of communication, project status and solution focused

• Project status is about schedule, budget, teams, and resources.

• Solution focused communication is about what's changing, i.e. deliverables, business process, tools, behavior.

• If the communication requirements were previously defined then review the requirements & Identify any changes that may have occurred since developing the initial requirements and how those changes may impact communication.

Identify and or Verify:

• individuals and groups that will need to receive communication

• Key messages for each group.

• Why they need the communication.

• The purpose of business communication is to trigger an action, define the action required.

• Describe how the key messages will be delivered and when