Communication Strategy

The planning and tracking of reports are key to the communication strategy of any project or company. In this article, we look at the basics of a communication report and planning out communications to various stakeholders.

The key to the communications strategy is establishing who your stakeholders are and what information they will wish to see (i.e. which reports). But you also need to establish the frequency of reporting to these individuals along with what communication methods they will expect (e.g. paper-based, e-mail, etc).

You need to brainstorm exactly what information stakeholders will want to see and try to formalize these into a set structure. It is often best to try and overlap the data required by various stakeholders so that there is not an excessive amount of work to be done to produce each communication report.

In basic terms, a template for communication reports of projects/products or any other sense of work progress should contain some fundamental elements. These elements include what the project objectives are, a summary of how the work is progressing, any financial information that is relevant, major/minor milestones, issues, risks/opportunities and any changes that been made to project plans.

Given this basic structure, a department can then alter these elements of the reports to highlight specific areas that are of key interest to stakeholders. For example, any groups involved with innovation strategy may initially have very little in the way of financial information and would prefer to focus on issues, risks and opportunities that they have identified.

Once the communication strategy has been written up and formally states the types of reports, frequency of communications and list of stakeholders, then the final stage is to actually track the progress of these communications. This is easily done using a spreadsheet to track individual reports against the list of stakeholders and should include details of when each report has been sent to the stakeholder.