STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS PLANNING

As the old saying goes, you need to know where you‘re going before you can know how to get there. Likewise,

…before you can plan out your strategy…

…before you even start to think about your media products or event…

…you need to nail down your objectives.

WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO?

In the very place you need to lay out what you‘re trying to achieve with a communications plan. For example:

• Do you want to educate your customers?


• Do you want to build support or create demand?


• Do you want to get people to do something differently?


• Do you want to defuse a situation?


• Do you want to improve the search results for your company/product/executives?


• Do you want to improve your organization‘s reputation?


• Do you want to generate more online or offline news coverage?

Whatever you want to do, this is where you define it.

DEFINING YOUR OBJECTIVES

To fall back on an old mantra from business school, your objectives need to be:

• Specific


• Measurable


• Achievable


• Realistic


• Time-focused

Make sure your objectives are measurable and time-focused. The specific, achievable and realistic characteristics will emerge from there. Vague objectives are a common pitfall. Ensure you can measure them and you will be forced to be ―specific. As for ―achievable and ―realistic, if your objectives don‘t meet those two criteria you don‘t deserve to be writing plans for anything.

One of the hardest parts of this to get your head around is the difference between business objectives and communications objectives. It’s important not to confuse the two. Remember — you can‘t take responsibility for the entire success or failure of the program. It helps to include the business objectives for the initiative in communications plan in addition to the communications objectives. Doing this helps to make sure your plan supports the overall business goals rather than working on its own.

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Scrum Appendix: Terminology

• Burn Down: The trend of work remaining across time in a Sprint, a Release, or a Product. The source of the raw data is the Sprint Backlog and the Product Backlog, with work remaining tracked on the vertical axis and the time periods (days of a Sprint, or Sprints) tracked on the horizontal axis.
  

  

  
  


• Chicken: Someone who is interested in the project but does not have formal Scrum responsibilities and accountability (Team, Product Owner, ScrumMaster).


• Daily Scrum: A short meeting held daily by each Team during which the Team members inspect their work, synchronize their work and progress and report and impediments to the ScrumMaster for removal. Follow-on meetings to adapt upcoming work to optimize the Sprint may occur after the Daily Scrum meetings.


• Done: Complete as mutually agreed to by all parties and that conforms to an organization’s standards, conventions, and guidelines. When something is reported as “done” at the Sprint Review meeting, it must conform to this agreed definition.


• Estimated Work Remaining (Sprint Backlog items): The number of hours that a Team member estimates remain to be worked on any task. This estimate is updated at the end of every day when the Sprint Backlog task is worked on. The estimate is the total estimated hours remaining, regardless of the number of people that perform the work.


• Increment: Product functionality that is developed by the Team during each Sprint that is potentially shippable or of use to the Product Owner’s stakeholders.


• Increment of Potentially Shippable Product Functionality: A complete slice of the overall product or system that could be used by the Product Owner or stakeholders if they chose to implement it.


• Sprint: An iteration, or one repeating cycle of similar work, that produces increment of product or system. No longer than one month and usually more than one week. The duration is fixed throughout the overall work and all teams working on the same system or product use the same length cycle.


• Pig: Someone exercising one of the three Scrum roles (Team, Product Owner, ScrumMaster) who has made a commitment and has the authority to fulfill it.


• Product Backlog: A prioritized list of requirements with estimated times to turn them into completed product functionality. Estimates are more precise the higher an item is in the Product Backlog priority.. The list emerges, changing as business conditions or technology changes.


• Product Backlog Item: Functional requirements, non-functional requirements, and issues, prioritized in order of importance to the business and dependencies and estimated. The precision of the estimate depends on the priority and granularity of the Product Backlog item, with the highest priority items that may be selected in the next Sprint being very granular and precise.


• Product Owner: The person responsible for managing the Product Backlog so as to maximize the value of the project. The Product Owner is responsible for representing the interests of everyone with a stake in the project and its resulting product.


• Scrum: Not an acronym, but mechanisms in the game of rugby for getting an out-of-play ball back into play


• ScrumMaster: The person responsible for the Scrum process, its correct implementation, and the maximization of its benefits.


• Sprint Backlog: A list of tasks that defines a Team’s work for a Sprint. The list emerges during the Sprint. Each task identifies those responsible for doing the work and the estimated amount of work remaining on the task on any given day during the Sprint.


• Sprint Backlog Task: One of the tasks that the Team or a Team member defines as required to turn committed Product Backlog items into system functionality.


• Sprint Planning meeting: A one-day meeting time boxed to eight hours (for a four week Sprint) that initiates every Sprint. The meeting is divided into two four-hour segments, each also time boxed.. During the first four hours the Product Owner presents the highest priority Product Backlog to the team. The Team and Product Owner collaborate to help the Team determine how much Product Backlog it can turn into functionality during the upcoming Sprint. The Team commits to this at the end of the first four hours. During the second four hours of the meeting, the Team plans how it will meet this commitment by designing and then detailing its work as a plan in the Sprint Backlog.


• Sprint Retrospective meeting: A time boxed three-hour meeting facilitated by the ScrumMaster at which the complete Team discusses the just-concluded Sprint and determines what could be changed that might make the next Sprint more enjoyable or productive.


• Sprint Review meeting: A time-boxed four hour meeting at the end of every Sprint where the Team collaborates with the Product Owner and stakeholders on what just happened in the Sprint. This usually starts with a demonstration of completed Product Backlog items, a discussion of opportunities, constraints and findings, and a discussion of what might be the best things to do next (potentially resulting in Product Backlog changes). Only completed product functionality can be demonstrated.


• Stakeholder: Someone with an interest in the outcome of a project, either because they have funded it, will use it, or will be affected by it.


• Team: A cross-functional group of people that is responsible for managing themselves to develop an increment of product every Sprint.


• Time box: A period of time that cannot be exceeded and within which an event or meeting occurs. For example, a Daily Scrum meeting is time boxed at fifteen minutes and terminates at the end of fifteen minutes, regardless. For meetings, it might last shorter. For Sprints, it lasts exactly that length

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Set Meaningful Goals with These Five Principles

Sometimes the only thing you need to get motivated is a clear goal with challenging aspects. Mind Tools explains how to set these types of goals with five basic principles.

These five principles, developed from Dr. Edwin Locke and Dr. Gary Latham’s theory of task motivation and incentives, make your goals feel drawing and worthwhile:

1. Clarity: Your goals need to be explicitly clear so you know exactly what you’re trying to achieve, and know how to measure your progress.


2. Challenge: Make sure your goal is challenging enough to keep you interested, but not so challenging you lose confidence.


3. Commitment: Your goal should feel achievable so you know you won’t give up, and find ways to remind yourself why you should work hard to keep moving forward.


4. Feedback: Find ways to receive feedback on what you’ve done, and analyze your progress and accomplishments so you can adjust the difficulty, if need be.


5. Task Complexity: If your goal is stressing you out because it’s too complex, break your big goal down into smaller sub-goals.

With these simple principles you’ll keep yourself in check while you move forward. It’s easier to overwhelm yourself than you think, but you also need to strike a balance and make sure your goals are challenging enough to keep you hooked.

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Yes, Email Is Exciting. Get Excited!

Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet.

“E-mail is dead, or at least that’s what Silicon Valley is banking on,” wrote Businessweek tech reporter Ashlee Vance.

There’s the co-founder of Asana, the work software startup. Email has “become a counter-productivity tool,” Justin Rosenstein likes to say.

Slack, the superhot work chat tool, likes to brag that they’ve “saved the world from over 70,000,000 emails” (if you assume that every five Slack messages prevent one email from getting its wings).

And it’s not just entrepreneurs with cloud software to sell. There are the young people, too, especially whatever we call the younger-than-Millennials.

Getting an email address was once a nerdy right of passage for Gen-Xers arriving on college campuses. Now, the kids are waging a war of indifference on poor old email, culling the weak and infirm old-people technology. One American professor maintained that, to his students, “e-mail was as antiquated as the spellings ‘chuse’ and ‘musick’ in the works by Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards.” The vice-chancellor of Exeter University claimed, “There is no point in emailing students any more.” The youth appear to think there are better, faster, more exciting ways to communicate than stupid email.

Yet, despite all the prognosticators predicting it will—choose the violence level of your metaphor—go out of style, be put out to pasture, or taken out back and shot,email grinds on.

You can’t kill email! It’s the cockroach of the Internet, and I mean that as a compliment. This resilience is a good thing.

“There isn’t much to sending or receiving email and that’s sort of the point,”observed Aaron Straup Cope, the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum’s Senior Engineer in Digital and Emerging Media. “The next time someone tells you email is ‘dead,’ try to imagine the cost of investing in their solution or the cost of giving up all the flexibility that email affords.”

Email is actually a tremendous, decentralized, open platform on which new, innovative things can and have been built. In that way, email represents a different model from the closed ecosystems we see proliferating across our computers and devices.

Email is a refugee from the open, interoperable, less-controlled “web we lost.” It’s an exciting landscape of freedom amidst the walled gardens of social networking and messaging services.

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How Often Should Your Project Team Meet?

Unfortunately, project team meetings are a must-do, and leaders who skip the staff meetings will quickly lose control of the project. Meetings, however, don’t have to be long and drawn out and should have specific agendas to keep the meeting on track.

In the project monitoring phase, there can be many types of meetings including progress meetings, facilitator meetings, risk management or problem and issue meetings, and even stakeholder meetings that involve not just the internal crew, but external stakeholders as well.

How often meetings are necessary or when to meet often depends on the type of meeting and the material to be covered.

Stakeholder Meetings – Stakeholder meetings that involve everyone from the external to the internal should be held in the project planning phase and if problems or risks are discovered that affect the entire project. A stakeholder meeting may also be necessary at product or process pre-launch and when presenting a project closing statement.

Progress Meetings – When looking at how often meetings for project status should be, they should be weekly, especially if you are managing projects globally or teams are in many locations. To cut down on meeting time, have team leaders meet and convey meeting results to teams. If questions need to be clarified from the teams, the team leaders should find answers to their questions and meet again. Often project facilitators can be the go-between of the project leader and designated team leaders.

Risk Management – Of course at project initiation, you most likely prepared a risk management plan. Often, risks that weren’t identified or ones that weren’t simply can’t be handled without input from the project manager and other required stakeholders. Hold these as risks are identified that affect the project and have no immediate solution in the risk management plan.

Problems and Issues – These types of meetings can range from team or individual conflicts to problems with external vendors, timelines or scheduling problems. These types of issues should be dealt with as quickly as possible and project managers should make haste in gathering the team.

Collaboration Meetings – Sometimes, in order for a project to proceed from one phase to another, collaborative team meetings are necessary to convey team progress to the awaiting team; the same applies when a milestone is met and it’s time to turn the project over to the next team. These should be held as milestones or goals occur.

Team Gatherings – For projects that are long and involve many aspects, hold a team-gathering meeting that is more of a fun day whether it be a sport outing or an afternoon of bowling—anything away from the office that can relieve stress. If your project is six months or longer, consider a team-gathering meeting mid-way through the project.

Final Production Meeting – Every stakeholder should attend final production meetings to explore project success and prepare for post-production meetings.

Post-Production Meetings – Once the project closing statement has been delivered, post-production meetings often help to determine future monitoring of the project, projections or any issues that may occur in the future.

Tips on Meetings

• How often meetings should be held certainly does depend on the meeting type.


• All these types of meetings have varying purposes and are required meetings.


• If you try and combine all meetings into one, you’ll end up with a free-for-all where nothing gets done and project teams and stakeholders are left behind or lost.


• Depending on your projects at hand, your meeting times may vary, so keep that in mind, keep the meeting length short and, if follow-up meetings are necessary, be sure to schedule them promptly.


• Finally, most meeting schedules (unless they are emergencies or problematic) can be set forth in your project communication plan.

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Be the Change You Want to See

What does it take to be an inspirational, motivational, effective, charismatic, powerful leader?

Strong leaders are essential for business success, never more so than in the current challenging climate. As a leader, you need to command respect, have presence and gravitas, combine strategy with emotional intelligence, make people naturally want to follow you, inspire your team to excellence.

Gandhi famously advised us “to be the change you want to see in the world.” I believe that leaders need to model, exemplify….essentially be what they are asking for in their teams and companies, and that this takes advanced personal development.

Self-understanding is fundamental. You need to understand yourself, your personality and what you need to be to deliver your best, and to understand and maximize how you come across to others.

Essentially, excellent leaders need to be authentic and to convey this congruence and alignment between thoughts, words, and actions in everything they do. Otherwise you get a jarring dissonance and disconnect that undermines your ability to lead effectively. You can’t be authentic if you don’t know who you are.

Integrity and authenticity are about wholeness, really, a state where your actions are aligned with both your individual values and the shared values of the company.

Here are some aspects to develop into leadership potential:

• Understanding your personality and how you can deliver your own unique brand of leadership


• Understanding the impact you have on others and how to maximize this


• Raising your energy so that work and life become mutually energizing rather than draining


• Identifying your needs and getting them met to raise your energy and effectiveness


• Identifying and leveraging your strengths to create brilliant results


• Understanding your values and leading with them to inspire others


• Creating clarity and alignment internally and externally to reach optimum performance


• Being exceptional not just in your business strategy, but in how you motivate and inspire your team to stretch into their potential and work together to deliver their best


• Personal development, approached with a systematic and structured framework, is, I believe, a precondition for brilliant, powerful leaders who need to embody the change they want to create, and the results they want to see.

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If You Want to Be More Productive, Stop Managing Time!

We all know what time management is or at least we think we do. We hear the expression and it’s clear – yep, I need to develop more skill around that. And usually we continue with our lives knowing that we potentially could manage our time better and benefit from it greatly but we… have no time to work on that. So some of the books written by people like Brian Tracy or Stephen Covey who dedicated their lives to teaching techniques for increased effectiveness and productivity, collect dust on the shelves of bookcases.

How do you make progress?

A few words are enough – “Nothing changes if nothing changes”. What can lead to progress is a shift of thinking, approach, opinion or maybe expectations. We have to establish what it is that will enable change in our lives. From there we can move forward knowing that we are no longer attached to obstacles but hopeful for a future. If you want a different outcome, you need to adapt a different approach. It is really that simple.

Decision made! I want to manage my time better.

So what is time management?

We all have our own idea. It can be used to describe a set of skills and techniques that we can develop to better manage our workload, prioritise, set goals and focus attention. This is the traditional approach.

But… can we really manage time? I have 24 hours each day available to me and I am sure it’s no different for you. Can I move the clock forwards or backwards? Nobody can. No matter what we do, time ticks away. It doesn’t need to and it can’t be managed.

Notice, that what we really want when it comes to time management is the effectiveness part. We want to have a sense of satisfaction at the end of a very productive day. This means that we don’t need to manage time. So if you want to be more productive, stop trying to manage it.

You want to focus your attention on ENERGY!

Yes, the key to success in increasing your personal effectiveness and productivity is through managing personal energy.The actions you want to take are around renewing your levels of energy and powering up. You can think and discover as many ways of managing your energy as you want. Honestly, the list could be endless.

There are 4 types of energy to manage: Physical, Emotional, Mental and Spiritual. Some of the best examples of energy renewing rituals could be:

• Drinking water throughout the day


• Take short but regular breaks (15 min of walking, breathing, meditation, chatting to someone about a topic that is not work related, listening to the music)


• Increasing exposure to sunlight or breathing fresh air


• Reading for inspiration


• Saying “No” to others and “Yes” to yourself


• Laughing and not taking things too seriously


• Brainstorming and getting other people involved


• Helping others


• Acts of kindness


• Celebration and rewards (yes, for adults too! Think hard. When was the last time you rewarded yourself?).

However before you proceed to do that, take the next few days to observe yourself. See patterns of thinking and action. Become familiar with your daily and weekly habits and routines. Make sure that you have clarity on how much time you invest in completing tasks. Find answers to questions about your most productive time of day and the environment in which you perform best. Start from the reality check and let it inform the changes that you will make in your life. Small, but significant.

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