Re: Project Management Office

[<wongword -at- ozemail -dot- com -dot- au>]

John is right. You need to work with them and they will help deliver you the 
materials on time. Their methodology includes a list of risks that will 
threaten your communications project (and the other parts) and they will 
ensure that everyone considers these risks. They will coordiante everyone 
and they should phone you regularly to catch up progress and concerns. This 
is all really good stuff.

It is just that my experience is that our project mgt methodology included a 
template for the communications plan. The template was naive and didn't 
address the right issues. When you're used to a more Hackos style of 
planning  their insistence on a particular inferior comms plan template 
always worried me. They just wouldn't change the template. Everyone else 
thought that it was the ideal comms plan because it was part of the project 
planning set of templates.

My other bad experience was that in the planning steps the comms people 
became involved at a certain stage but this was *after* the audiences and 
their needs had been defined in an earlier meeting to which we were not 
invited. Sometimes we didn't even know about the project until after certain 
steps had been taken and things like audiences and needs had been set in 
concrete and blessed by the project board.

Irene Wong