New Communication Plan Template

The popular project management website Method123.com, today released a new set of project management templates for communication planning.

While focused primarily on communication planning for medium to large scale organizations, the project management templates have broad use for communications planning in any industry. “Few managers or executives formally document a plan of their communication events” says Jason Westland, founder of Method123 Ltd. “They don’t’ have the time needed to create a proper plan, from scratch. That’s where the templates come in handy. They allow a manager to pick up an existing template and simply fill in the gaps. The templates are pre-populated with a table of contents, document structure and procedures for completion. They also contain practical examples to help managers and teams fill them in.

“So the process of planning a communication event in an organization is now much easier than before, using these practical, comprehensive document templates” says Westland.

To create the new templates, Method123 spent weeks analyzing all of the online project management templates available. They spoke to existing customers to confirm the types of information that would be most valuable, and how that information should be presented. They found that most customers have the same requirements when it comes to planning a communications event. Customers want to be able to identify the target audience, confirm stakeholders and methods of communication, and plan the events needed to communicate effectively.

“It was surprising that almost every company we spoke to, have the same communication process” says Westland. “They identify who they want to communicate formally with, they then decide on the message and the method, and finally they try and get feedback on the effectiveness of the communication undertaken. So we created a communication plan template to help them to plan this process more efficiently. The template helps a business to set out all of the communications events that they will undertake over a specified period of time. It then helps them to plan each event, to make sure that the right information is given to the right people at the right time. It’s perfect for projects, departments and organizations that take their communications seriously.”

One of the most important steps in the communications process takes place after the communications event has finished. That step is gathering feedback. The project management templates offered by Method123 now include a full feedback process, to ensure that the people who plan the events, get feedback on the success of each event they run. In that way, they can learn from past experiences and ensure that they improve on communications in the future.

Method123 will release more communications templates in the future like this online project management.