Planning is worth the time spent.

A few days ago I wrote a blog discussing the first chapter of one of my textbooks for by current master’s course.  The book, Assessing Organizational Communication: Strategic Communication Audits by Cal W. Downs and Allyson D. Adrian, talks about a positive audit, the communication audit. Today I am going to use the blog to explore the second chapter of the book: Initiating and Planning and Audit. If you couldn’t guess, the second chapter has two sections, a shorter one on initiation, and a longer one on planning.

It seems a lot of communication goes into setting up a communication audit. This is because not everyone has the same idea of what it is, or how it should be conducted. So let us discuss the two phases.

Phase 1: Initiation

This in the phase where the auditors meet the key people. During this phase you achieve the following objectives:

1. Accommodate the client’s purposes
2. Achieve consensus about the project
3. Define the scope of the assessment
4. Familiarize the assessment team with the organization
5. Familiarize management with the assessment procedure

Once this is achieved, the real decision has been made to undertake the audit, which allows the shape of the audit to be defined during the next phase:

Phase 2: Planning

Phase two is the roadmap for the audit, including several practical and prosaic sections:

Financial Arrangements — what expenses are involved, how and when they are paid.

Decide the Nature of the Report — who receives the results of the audit, and in what format

Clarify the Auditor-Client Relationship — choose which of several models defines the way the client and auditors will relate to each other.

1. Purchase Model
2. Medical Model
3. Process Model

Arrange Liaison with the organization 

Determine Focal Areas — this is done by answering a series of questions similar to those below:

• What do you need to know for the analysis?
• What would you like to know?
• What information is it possible to get?
• What are your priorities? Management priorities?
• What information will most benefit the organization in the feedback?

Once you know the focal areas, you can make the next decision,

Select Assessment techniques — The choice is among methods such as:

1. Observations
2. Interviews
3. Questionnaires
4. Critical Incidents
5. Network Analysis
6. Content Analysis
7. Focus Groups
8. Communication Diaries

In choosing how many of the methods, and which ones to choose, the following suggestions are helpful:

• Choose multiple methods to get triangulation of data
• Focus on behaviors as well as perceptions
• Collect data through electronic means (people today write more on an electronic response than on paper by hand)

Choose the Employees to be Audited

If you skew the sample you skew the results.  Having a proper pool involved gives the best results. The authors suggest the following points:

1.  Stratified sampling is necessary
2. Avoid making the sample too small
3. Include all key people
4. Do not overlook part-time people

The examples of sample size for organization requires you to poll more than half of all the people involved until the size of the organization is 380 people. So an accurate polling will require a lot of work.

Forecast the Time Sequence

The time-line is an essential part of the planning. It not only ensures the auditor is able to complete what is needed in a specific time-frame, it also gives management a sense of progress. This keeps management’s support behind the effort needed for a successful audit.

Publicize the Assessment Before it Happens

The way the audit is announced to the organization is critical to its success. Those involved need to know what they are doing and why. They need to have buy-in, need to feel it is worth their time giving the feedback. The authors suggest at least three form of information be used to announce the audit.

Formalize Audit Arrangements

Once everything is together, put it down in writing, perhaps create a formal contract, or put the details in a letter to the client.This gives something both sides can reference in the future when facts about what was intended get blurred by the passage of time.

Conclusion

The auditors emphasize that time spent in the planning stage saves time later as the audit runs its course. It also enables the auditors to clearly present themselves as professionals providing a service of unique and present benefit to the organization.

From my personal perspective, I am one who likes to have a clear framework before I get started on something, but I have trouble putting the framework together myself sometimes. Having an outline such as this chapter presents, should make it easier for me to sketch such a path out — as daunting as all this information makes an audit seem.

(P.S. — The title of this blog is somewhat ironic, considering that I have written it twice.  After putting it all together, WordPress found a way to totally erase every bit of work I did on it tonight.  I had started it on Sunday, and had a few notes from there, but that was all.  So the question is, was all that planning time well spent, as far as today’s blog is concerned?)