When building your communication plan, consider your stakeholders and your relationship with them. Do you know who they are? Have you worked with them previously and if so, how was the interaction? Have you ever interacted with them outside of needing something from them or them needing something from you? If you answer no to these questions, you need to begin to build a relationship with your stakeholders in order to enable for effective communications with them. If you have worked with them before but have had poor interactions with them, consider that you need to start from the beginning in re-building a relationship with them before you can effectively engage them in the project. Yes, this takes time and effort on your part. However, the best project managers have worked to establish relationships throughout the organization and with potential stakeholders before they need those relationships. If you do not have these relationships in place, your first communication plan must be focused around reaching out to stakeholders to build relationships and begin to build trust. Simple Communication Plan Components- - Your simple communication plan should capture the following elements: - With whom you will communicate (e.g., leadership team) - What will be communicated (e.g., status report on project) - When you will communicate (e.g., monthly) - How you will communicate (e.g., at the leadership meeting) - Format for your communications (e.g., presentation at the meeting) The simple communication plan enables for a high-level overview of your communications with stakeholders. By focusing on stakeholder groups (e.g., leadership team), it enables for more effective and efficient communications. Unless there is a pressing reason to do so, I want to keep my stakeholders grouped for communications rather than communicating with every single individual stakeholder. This enables me to better control and manage my communications overall and reduce the time I need to spend in communications. Source- Abudi, G. (2013). Managing communications effectively and efficiently. Paper presented at PMI Global Congress 2013-North America, New Orleans, LA. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute. Answer ALL the questions in this section.

Question 1

(10 Marks) With reference to the extract above, discuss the reasons as to why it is important to balance issues in regard to building a good and effective communication plan.