Change management communication plan with template

A change management communication plan defines which group receives which message, when, through which channel and from whom, from the first announcement until weeks after go-live. It builds on the stakeholder analysis and answers two questions that are often forgotten: who is the right sender, and how often does a message need to be repeated? According to Prosci, people want to hear the reasons for a change from leadership, but the consequences for their own work from their direct manager. A free template as an Excel file with an example is further down.

What goes into a communication plan?

A communication plan is a table, not a strategy on twenty slides. Each row is one message to one group. You need at least these columns:

Column	Question	Example
Audience	Who needs to know?	Field sales, southern region
Purpose	What should the group know, want or be able to do afterwards?	Understands why visit reports move into the CRM
Message	What is the core in one sentence?	“So that before every visit you see what service and inside sales last discussed with the customer.”
Sender	Who says it?	Head of sales
Channel	How?	Regional meeting, then a short summary by email
Timing	When?	10 weeks before go-live
Owner	Who prepares it and makes sure it happens?	Change manager
Feedback channel	Where do questions go?	Regional key user, shared mailbox

The purpose column is the most important one and the one most often missing. It links the message to the stage a group is at right now. In the ADKAR model these are awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement. A message meant to build awareness looks completely different from one that passes on knowledge. Putting both into the same circular email usually achieves neither.

Leadership explains the why, managers explain the impact

The sender decides whether a message is taken seriously. In its Best Practices in Change Management research series, Prosci asked from whom employees want to hear which information. The result is clear and summarised in an article on why some communications work and others do not1:

Type of message	Preferred sender	Typical content
Business reasons	Senior leadership, sponsor	Why are we changing? What happens if we do not? How does it fit the direction of the company?
Personal impact	Direct manager	What changes for me and my team? What is expected of me? Where do I get help?
Content and dates	Project team, key users	When is the training? How does the new process work? Whom do I ask?

In practice the project team often sends everything because it knows the content. That is convenient and weak. A circular email from the project team on “why are we doing this?” does not carry the weight of an explanation by the managing director in a town hall. And only someone who knows the team can answer “what does this mean for me?”. So the project team drafts, the managers speak.

This leads to a task that is easily overlooked: managers need their messages before their team does. A short briefing with the most important questions and answers, one week before the team meeting, turns a hesitant manager into a credible one.

How do you build a communication plan?

1. 01

   Take the groups from the stakeholder analysis

   1 hour · change manager

   Every highly affected group gets rows of its own. Groups with high influence and little impact are informed selectively.

2. 02

   Write the key messages

   2 to 3 hours · sponsor and change manager

   One change story for everyone on why something changes, and one or two sentences per group on what changes for them.

3. 03

   Define senders and channels

   1 hour · project manager

   Reasons from leadership, personal impact from the manager, content from the project team. Personal channels for sensitive messages.

4. 04

   Plan backwards from go-live

   1 hour · project manager and change manager

   When does which group need to know what? Plan key messages several times, across different channels.

5. 05

   Set up feedback and adjust

   ongoing · change manager

   Collect questions, add frequent ones to the next message, adjust the plan when a group does not follow.

A communication plan is a living document. If the same question keeps coming back after an announcement, the answer belongs in the next message, and perhaps a row is missing for a group you underestimated. The basis for this is the stakeholder analysis.

Example: communication plan for a CRM rollout

For introducing a CRM system such as Salesforce in sales, an extract could look like this. Weeks count backwards from go-live:

Week	Audience	Purpose	Message	Sender	Channel
−12	Everyone in sales	Awareness	Why we introduce one shared CRM and what happens otherwise	Managing director	Town hall
−11	Sales managers	Desire	Your role, your questions, your messages for the team	Sponsor	Briefing
−10	Field sales	Awareness	What changes for visit reports and forecasts	Regional head of sales	Regional meeting
−8	Works council	Awareness	Which reports the system allows and which it does not	Sponsor	Meeting
−4	Inside sales	Knowledge	New quoting process, training dates	Project team	Email and intranet
−2	Everyone affected	Knowledge	What happens on go-live day, whom to ask	Key users	Team meeting
+2	Everyone affected	Reinforcement	First successes, most frequent questions, what we improve	Head of sales	Team meeting and email

Notice how few rows come from the project team, and that communication does not end at go-live. The message in week +2 is one of the most important: in this period morale and productivity often drop, as the change curve describes, and visible successes help people through the valley.

A global rollout adds another dimension. When countries in the US, Asia and Europe are involved, as in a Salesforce Sales Cloud rollout I supported, every country needs its own senders in its own language. A message from headquarters in English does not replace the country manager explaining why in their own meeting.

Communication plan template

The template as an Excel file contains an empty table with all columns from this article and the example from above. It is built so that you can take the groups straight from the stakeholder analysis template.

Which mistakes happen in change communication?

• Too late. Communication starts two weeks before go-live and can then only inform. Awareness and desire take weeks, not days.
• One sender for everything. The project team sends everything, the managers stay silent. To the team it looks as if they do not support the change.
• Content without reasons. Training dates and instructions without an explanation of why something changes answer the wrong question.
• No feedback channel. If questions have no place to go, they end up in the kitchen and come back as rumours.
• Silence after go-live. The hardest phase only starts after go-live. Going quiet then leaves the interpretation to those who are unhappy.

Salesforce programmes with regular releases need a form of their own: every new version changes something for a business team and needs a short, targeted announcement. Fabian Kramer describes how that works in Communicating Salesforce releases to the business.

Support pays off when many groups and countries are affected

For a change affecting one team, the template is enough. When many groups and countries are affected, when sensitive messages are due or when managers are unsure themselves, an outside view helps to sharpen messages and prepare managers. In Salesforce programmes I work with Fabian Kramer on this, see Salesforce change management consulting and Salesforce change management: why rollouts fail.

Prosci and ADKAR are registered trademarks of Prosci, Inc.

Sources1

1. 1why some communications work and others do not (opens in a new tab)prosci.com