The Right Message - Can y'all here me in da back?

Comms to your users
One of things you'll need to do as a TPM is communicate messages out to people. This could be a large group of people, it could be a really small group of people. In either case you will need to do it at some point. For example, you're about to do a hardware refresh on an old system that is mission critical, has about 3000 users logged on in office hours as well as external users who log on at the weekend aswell.



What are you going to do? Obviously for you to do the refresh, you need an outage, how are you going to get all users to stay off the system while you're doing this?

Well, you can either:
-Communicate to each user individually
OR
-You can appoint or establish liaisons within the different business communities.

The first suggestion is ok, but a bit awkward because as a TPM, the users may not know you, they'll probably just see you as IT - and the fact is - they dont like IT peeps - That is the truth. They look at us like.................like how alot of people look at 'Big Issue' sellers in your local market place - full of hate and stink (One of these days when i walk into an office i'm going to shout 'Big Issue!').

The second suggestion is a much better approach. Try and get someone on board who will represent that area of users. Usually a Team Leader/Manager or some kind of Change Manager is good for functions like this.

Better still if you have a comms team, get them on board to do your comms for you....BUT BEWARE.....THEY WALK A DIFFERENT PATH...

Before your internal comms people send out anything on your behalf...CHECK IT! Make sure your thoughts have been captured fully and accurately. Dont put your ideas into the comms sausage machine and expect your thoughts to come out accurately at the other end. It WONT! Check it, then get them to send it.

Often time, people will want to respond to comms that have gone out. If you're sending comms out to lots of people (i'd say more than 30) use a seperate mailbox. That way you can keep a track of where you are and not get lost amongst all your other tasks or projects. If this isnt possible, use a seperate folder within your current mailbox and setup a rule to filter on the subject line to that newly created folder.

Whenever someone mails you for info, if you dont have the answer straight away, just send them a really snappy mail anyway to say, "hey, i got your mail, i'm looking into, back to you shortly". There is nothing more annoying than sending a mail off to someone and............................................................................................

...............then a response. That annoys the nut allergy out of me!