Case Scenario:
You are a project manager in the corporate headquarters finance department for a global investment management firm, 1995 Financial. The finance department consists of three different teams, one in headquarters (Chicago) and two regional offices (Topeka, Kansas and Longmont, Colorado). Each regional office used to be its own company but was then bought up by 1995. You are managing a project that will result in a large number of operating processes and procedures being updated and standardized in response to recent legislation. The project will involve documenting processes and procedures from all the offices, analyzing each one for effectiveness and adherence, making changes, and then training all the offices on the finalized processes and procedures. The project’s sponsor, Katy (chief operating officer), has stressed to all the offices that headquarters’ procedures are not the default; something better may exist in the regional offices. The sizes of the Longmont and Topeka departments are the same, 50 employees respectively, and the Chicago department has about 115 employees.
This is the first project you are managing with the regional offices. You have heard from your peers that it is very difficult to get the regional offices to participate—they do not dial in for meetings, do not respond to e-mails, and only finish deliverables late (if at all). In many cases, your peers had to replace those team members with people from headquarters. You know this project will be difficult from a people perspective—the ways people work are going to be analyzed and evaluated. This is a perfect opportunity to completely destroy working relationships among the different groups if it is not done right.
What Katy knows (and your peers do not) is that you used to work in one of the regional offices before it was purchased by 1995. Nine months before the purchase, you left that company, moved from Longmont to Chicago, and joined 1995. You used to work in the purchasing department, but you took the job as the finance department manager when you joined the firm. You suspect that Katy thinks your past experience in the Longmont office will make you a more inclusive project manager, resulting in better business value from the project.
You are starting to plan the project. You know that effective communication is going to be critical, so you decide to focus on the communication plan. You have support from Katy that there will be adequate funding to finance this project, including enough funding to help you procure any necessary communications resources, tools, methodologies, and in developing the actual project communications plan.
Problem 1: Determine how you intend to manage communication for this project.
Problem 2: Discuss the communication process that you intend to follow for resolving stakeholder issues, processing change requests, and how you intend on reviewing and approving deliverables.
Problem 3: Define the communication mechanisms that will be used and for what purpose. For each communication procedure, define the purpose of the communication, the frequency, the roles involved, if and how the communication will be scheduled and documented, and the information that will be shared.
Problem 4: Describe the approach you will take to monitor project status, manage issues, and obtain deliverable sign-offs. Assuming the project will last a total of 9 months when scheduling the communications plan.
800 to 900 words plus references.