When Early Man* slid down from the trees and stood up on the African savannah, the first thing he did was start looking for sources of risk. (Unless he was unlucky, in which case a risk ate him before he even got started.) His approach...
I just ran across this in my files and thought it was so important I wanted to share it immediately. Besides that, I haven't written the entry on using risk lists yet. Keep this flowchart in your files and refer to it next time you're planning...
Once upon a time, when I was still a pretty new project manager, I got assigned a dotted-lined reporting relationship to someone other than my usual program manager. The project was a big one, in terms of both dollars and prestige, and the guy was...
"Zen and the Art of Project Management." Not an original thought. Not even an original title. But it's a glorious October Sunday evening and I am sitting on the front porch watching the last light hit the turning leaves before it goes behind the brow...
Recently, I spent a few glorious days at WaterColor Inn on the Florida panhandle (oil sitings: zero). During the visit, I had the good fortune to chat with Cheryl Walton, the Inn’s wedding and events guru. Our talk confirmed what I’ve long suspected: a wedding is a project and...
Okay, now that I’ve gotten weddings out of my system (see the previous post), it’s back to project management communications (see the post before the previous post). If your project communications are going to be good, you’ve got to have a plan. The plan can be fancy, with grids of stakeholders...
If you’re going to analyze your stakeholders, or even just take them to lunch, you need to know who they are first. After deciding on the goal of your communication plan, the next step is to identify the stakeholders. I’ve seen plenty of writers simply suggest brainstorming orasking around as...
To communicate effectively, you’ve got to know what’s appropriate. After all, you wouldn’t screen a movie like The Evil Dead for a bunch of kindergartners, would you? A solid stakeholder analysis is the key to providing targeted project communications that will meet the needs of...
Way to go! You’ve set the goal for your communications plan, identified your stakeholders and divided them into segments. Now you’ve actually got to send them something. You can take a couple of approaches. Approach one is to decide what you’re going to send and then decide who gets it....
It occurs to me that after my waxing philosophical and getting all academic about communication planning, some of you might want to know what deliverables you might actually have to come up with. Fair enough, but be careful what you wish for… it can be a lot...