The cunning PM communications plan Every new project begins as an idea in someone's head and pretty soon it becomes a conversation, a series of meetings and, if approved, a fully scoped project. The conversations continue throughout the project as part of the process. Experts say a communications plan should be formulated within the overall project. Such a plan …
Okay, so the section this article was filed under should have been a bit of clue, but it was still a few moments before I figured PM didn't mean Personal Message or Prime Minister.
I guess it goes to show we all make assumptions about the audience, but if you have a good article its visibility can reach further than you expect.
Mind you, it always makes me smile the way the Economist go too far the other way, making no assumptions about prior knowlege - "BT, a telecommunications company" etc.
There's these hippies Out There that've been doing much the same thing in mailing lists, usenet, using irc, what-have-you. Yes, wikis too. IM systems not so much as you usually need to talk to multiple people.
Twitter isn't special and worse, much harder to control, as in once posted you can't un-publish the them. They're in somebody else's database even if you remove them, and who wants to put his great ideas right on the public internet for all to see?
Much better to keep that sort of thing in your own hands. Plenty of tech-driven companies do, and run their own mailinglist software, their own news server, their own irc server, their own wiki or blogsite, all internal. The key is never the technology, but always to find something that fits the workflows of the team or company and then get people to use the tool to good effect. It matters very little what it is, as long as people do use it.
micros~1 hasn't set much of a standard in any of that. It never fails to puzzle why people think they're great at management, as (per Drucker) the only place to see and measure the results of management is outside the company. And looking at what they produce, er, it's not pretty.
but where i work, the project manager title pretty much refers to any monkey able to randomly mash a keyboard with microsoft project open.
I understand that they should perform a vital role... I'd just occasionally like to see someone, whose job title is PM, actually do it!
"This will be 6 months work for our current team... OK, you've got to implement it next month, I've hired you 5 offshore resources to help... OK, but who's going to train them and give them the necessary 3-4 years experience in the next 2 days? And by the way, that 6 months does include the 3 months of actual elapsed time* you will require to even come close to testing it" Familiar to anyone?
My experience of PM's is a group of people who make decisions, and take responsibility, for things even if anyone with half a brain would see were doomed immediately.
*We really do have some testing that requires 14 weeks of elapsed time, assuming everything goes swimmingly!
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