Who needs to know what by when and in which format? Every time you work on developing a new communication management plan, ask yourself this questions, it is the key to develop a robust communication plan, misevaluating a stakeholder is sometimes as bad as missing the stakeholder altogether, I will share with you a mindmap that can help you develop a comprehensive communication management plan

If you look at the above question you will have to to work on the stakeholders first, when it comes to stakeholders identification do not hesitate to add any person, department, authority, organization, or even competitor to your list, it is better to include a stakeholder who may not be 100% interested in the project rather than identifying him in a later stage, most of organizations tend to keep attention to the positive stakeholders only and overlook negative stakeholders who have to receive more attention than positive stakeholders, negative stakeholders do not have any positive interest in your project and will always try to find ways to screw up the project.

Stakeholders Identification

Stakeholders identifications is the first step on the road of having a solid communication plan, though it seems to be an easy activity but you will need to be very cautious to avoid the impact of missing a major stakeholder, you can identify stakeholders by looking into the project charter and examining organization structure to see who may be interested in the project, departments such as marketing, sales, operations, and customer support are all good candidates, if your project is a national project that will serve broad segment of citizens then media & newspapers should be on your list, if the project has some environmental impact you will have to consider adding Environmental Protection Agencies to your stakeholder registry, you will need to boost the power of your left brain in order to identify as many stakeholders as you can, consulting key stakeholders can also help you identify more stakeholders.

You will need to maintain a stakeholder registry that should include the contact details of each and every stakeholder and any other information that can help you understand your stakeholders’ needs, there is no better tool than mind mapping to identify as many stakeholders as you can.

Stakeholder Analysis

Once you have the stakeholders registry ready, you will need to elaborate on the characteristics and preferences of each and every stakeholder, some of the key attributes are:

• Type: It’s important to know whether the stakeholder is internal or external, often times internal stakeholders have positive interest in the ultimate outcome of the project, nevertheless they can disagree with the implementation approach or the selected vendor
• Class: negative or positive, we tend to focus on positive ones and overlook negative stakeholders, negative stakeholders are silent killers who can turn the tables on you at any stage of the project
• Peak Interest: different stakeholders will have different level of interest during the project, for example team members will have peak interest during the build stage while project sponsor and portfolio management team will have the maximum interest during the initiating stage, it is important to know when people will have the maximum interest in order to meet their expectations with regard to the amount of information to be shared
• Preferred Communication Method: This highly depends on the profile and culture of the stakeholder, someone who spends 75% of his time attending meetings will not be able to take phone calls and will prefer email, instant messenger may be a good option to communicate with team members, face to face presentation can be the best option to communicate information to steering committee members
• Power & Interest: I have to say that dealing with all the stakeholders with the same strategy does not work, you will have to adopt a different strategy with each stakeholder based on their needs and profile, there are different techniques that can help you identify proper strategy to deal with stakeholders such as Power/Interest model, interest refers to engagement or involvement, in a nutshell you will need to satisfy powerful stakeholders and work with people whose interest in the project

Never show the stakeholders the power and interest ranks you have given them, you will have to keep this information for yourself, if people get to know that you consider them powerless, they will either confront you and situation will get worse or they will not be as cooperative as you expect them to be.

Power & Interest of stakeholders are very likely to change during the project, a stakeholder may get promoted and his power may increase over night, you will need to adapt your strategy to meet his expectations ( Please don’t be a sycophant ), you also need to keep stakeholder identification and management a continuous activity during all project sages, some people can leave the project and new ones can join it, and so you will have to repeat the same activity with newly identified stakeholders.

Communication Matrix

After you have identified and analyzed your stakeholders’ needs everything will become relatively easy, you will need to itemize the information that will be exchanged with the stakeholders and you will need to identify all the required meetings and send meeting invitations ahead of time, another important thing you can do is to attach the ground rules to your communication management plan this will save you great deal of arguments and wasted time when the project gets into build stage, ground rules will communicate to stakeholders what you don’t want to tell them verbally to avoid embarrassment, companies waste tremendous amount of time & money on ineffective meetings, you can read my post Better Meetings for more about meetings.

Communication Mindmap

The communication management mindmap has some items that I think maybe common to most of projects however you can tailor it to match your needs, you can have meetings with stakeholders to get their communication needs and you can use the mindmap to capture their needs, don’t forget to hide the power & interest columns, I have spent considerable time to brainstorm and create the mindmap, and it would be great if you let me know whether you liked the mindmap or how you used or changed it, it would also be great if you change the mindmap and re-publish it to everyone ( I love open source ) you can open the mindmap using Xmind. Once you fill the blanks, you can have your own document version of communication management plan, it would also be generous to release it to fellow project managers, would love to receive your comments, Enjoy!

Update (06/04/2010):

I used some icons in the mindmap that may not show properly in your Xmind, if you face this issue you can download my markers package unzip it, and import to your Xmind, it is worth mentioning that all the icons in the package are free for commercial use with no attribution required!

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