Changing how your teams work is hard. In my previous post, I covered the first three of my learnings in my time as a Strategic Customer Success Manager at Jama. I’m now going to fill you in on how to approach communicating about Jama to your various stakeholders.
We all know we need to communicate, but communicating about change needs to be thought through. It’s not enough to post a broad scale notification on the company’s intranet and hope that readers can “right-size” this information and accurately apply it’s meaning to their roles. Do everyone a solid and think through the various categories of people who need to be brought up to speed and spoon feed them only the information they need to digest.
To do this correctly, this needs to be done in advance – then actually executed. I say this because once the process of rolling the tool out begins, things get muddy and you will forget to notify folks in the way you’d envisioned. Think about each group of people you’re communicating with. In my experience there are several groups: leadership, those creating requirements, stakeholders, etc. Some of these people will be defined by Jama license type, some will not. Tell them what they want to know. For example, how you communicate with your leadership will be different from somebody who will be simply reviewing and chiming in on requirements. Below is an example of what I’m talking about.
Communication Plan
| Audience | Responsibilities | Interests and Concerns | What do they need to know? | Communications Methods |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Business Analysts Product Owners |
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| Leaders and Management |
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| Stakeholders and Requirement Reviewers | Review requirements and provide feedback | Don’t understand why they need to change how they provide requirement feedback |
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Another wrinkle of the communications plan is to think through the cultural norms and politics at play in your organization. Actually think about the order of communications and who needs to know what and when. Are there influencers you need to hit one on one? Perhaps there is a member of the team part of the old guard who needs to be spoon fed information. Don’t fight it – account for it and assure they get the information they need in a way they can digest it. And don’t forget about external resources – partners and consultants that are helping you bring your products to market.
The last important thing I’d like to share with you about this is to share your wins widely. Make your improvements and advancements in your process public knowledge! Even small improvements in your process can have dramatic results over the long haul, so talk it up. And not just in your team meetings and stand-ups either – be sure leadership is aware their investment is starting to bear fruit. Not only will this garner goodwill with your management, but it will encourage further adoption and help silence latent naysayers.