Slap the Editor! Fine Points of the Successful Big Project Newsletter (Part 1)

Joe Wynne is a versatile Project Manager experienced in delivering medium-scope projects in large organizations that improve workforce performance and business processes. He has a proven track record of delivering effective, technology-savvy solutions in a variety of industries and a unique combination of strengths in both process management and workforce management.

 

Scene from a cube…

A worker in a big project receives her regular project newsletter. She looks at the first page. There's an article by the editor explaining how glad he is to be editor of this newsletter. He describes his career in the company. Another article describes a project event that only top leaders were invited to. Photos show them enjoying themselves, probably with budget money just cut from her team. Okay, not much on page one. Maybe there's more on the next page. An article on corporate cutbacks in the face of foreign competition. It says to look for related updates in future editions. Great. The next article is how this project fits into the new corporate strategy. There's less detail than documents provided to all project workers earlier. Her resolution: Mark future editions as junk mail without reading.

A big project means the potential for big communication problems. Large groups can function without the latest information. Workers can feel cut off, become disengaged. Teams can work with wrong assumptions, miss critical changes in priorities and scope. These big communication inadequacies lead to big errors.

To counteract all these problems, a newsletter cannot be a monthly overview of happy talk, fluff, generalities and trivia controlled by a low-level flunky spending more time getting grammar just right than …

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