Marketing and Self Development explained - Corporate Skills » Project Management Skills

Marketing Communication Plan Templates

Sheraz Alvi — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 10:11:43 +0000

Marketing Communications Plan is the marketing plan which incorporates two or more integrated marketing communications mediums aiming to reiterate the same goals and objectives. Marketing Communications Plans are considered by many professionals as an excellent way to effectively communicate with target audience.
Marketing Communications Plans are generally based on two different frameworks: Marketing Communications Planning Framework and SOSTAC (Fill, 1999).

Marketing Communications Plans consist of the following vital elements:

Context analysis
Promotional objectives
Marketing communications strategy
Promotional mix (methods and tools)
Budget schedule
Evaluation and control"

When writing marketing communications plan it is important to:
1. Set corporate, marketing and marketing communications objectives, which would support and integrate with each other.
2. Develop segmentation, targeting and positioning strategies
3. Develop creative message with which Marketing Communications Plan with communicate with target audience
4. Select and justify one or combination of marketing strategies (push, pull or profile)
5. Develop well-rounded and creative set of promotional mediums and allocate appropriate budget for each medium.
6. Create contingency planning strategy (in case something goes wrong)
7. Set strict set of evaluation and control mediums which would include milestones and continuous evaluation

SOSTAC Model Of Marketing – step by step

Sheraz Alvi — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 16:28:46 +0000

What Is The SOSTAC Model Of Marketing?

SOSTAC Model was invented by Paul Smith, who is a best selling marketing author, international speaker and consultant. He is the originator of SOSTAC ® Planning System used by organisations around the world. Visit: http://www.prsmith.org/

SOSTAC focuses on the six most important elements of any business SOSTAC is an acronym for these six elements: That may look intimidating at first glance. But, each element asks a simple question and provides an easy starting point.

Situation analysis, asks what the current state of the business is.
Objectives, helps list an overview of goals for the business.
Strategy helps provide a “big picture” plan to achieve the goals
Tactics breaks down the “big picture” strategy into smaller details
Action helps assign responsibility and deadlines for certain tasks
Control offers an easy way to track the progress of the plan

Each of these six elements contributes an essential piece of the overall marketing plan. We can also look at it in another manner:

SOSTAC is an Acronym for the 6 basic elements of the Marketing Plan:

Situation Where are we now?
Objectives Where do we want to get to?
Strategy How are we going to get there? – The Big Picture
Tactics How are we going to get there? – The Detail
Actions Who is going to do what and when?
Control How can we control, measure and develop the process?

Each element relates to a key step in the process. Simply work through the Pro-Forma on the following pages step by step and fill in the gaps to suit your business and your goals.
One thing you need to be aware of:

Often people deal with the SOS as a wish-list of achievements and then fail to develop and implement a detailed, controllable & measurable action plan (the TAC). This leads to a statement of great goals with no clear idea of how – or even if you can achieve them. We will be looking specifically at Action Planning in a future issue of News & Views If however you would like some help in developing and, more importantly IMPLEMENTING, a marketing plan, we would be delighted to talk to you.

Lets see them now one by one and try to cover what exactly we need to do:

STAGE 1 SITUATION ANALYSIS WHERE ARE WE NOW?

How are we performing?
What are our distinctive competitive (marketing) advantages?
How effective is our Marketing Mix?
Are we focusing on the best segments with the right type of customer?
Are we using the most appropriate channels for communication and distribution?
What uncontrollable event(s) or trend(s) can impact my business?

STAGE 2 SET OBJECTIVES WHERE DO WE WANT TO GO?

Business Mission?
Business Objectives?
Marketing Objectives – Business Development?
Marketing Communication Objectives?
The SMART Test for Objectives
Make sure your objectives are practical and measurable. Do they fit the following criteria?
- Specific (with numbers)
- Measurable (to monitor progress and confirm achievement)
- Actionable (can we do it?)
- Reasonable (realistically attainable)
- Timed (incorporate deadlines)

STAGE 3 STRATEGY HOW DO WE GET THERE?

Segmentation – How do we want to divide up the market(s)?
Targeting – Which segments of the market do we wish to focus upon?
Positioning – How do we want to be perceived in each different target segment?

STAGE 4 TACTICAL PLAN HOW DO WE IMPLEMENT THE STRATEGY?

Which Communication Tools are we going to use?
How are we going to use them?
What message(s) do we wish to communicate?
Are we being consistent across different tools and messages?
Do we have the necessary resources/budgets?

STAGE 5 ACTION PLAN WHO, WHAT, WHEN?

Who is going to do what?
When are they going to do it?
What is the resource allocation for the action?
What are the key performance measurements?
How is performance going to be recorded?

STAGE 6 CONTROL KEEPING TRACK OF PROGRESS

Do action performance measurements relate to objectives?
Responsibility for measurement?
Frequency of measurement?
Resources for measurement?
Review of measurements?
Actions on variance?

If you are able to answer and work towards finding the answers to all the questions discussed above you are bound to have a perfect working plan which now needs implementations and team work. We have seen that SOSTAC not only works for marketing purposes but it is a very important and quick Project Management tool.

So in siutations where you have to do a quick project plan and there is too much info flowing around and you cant focus SOSTAC can be your rescuer.

The 5 Cs of Team-building

Naveed Rahmat — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 15:12:16 +0000

“Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” –Andrew Carnegie

Running a company, even if it is a small business, needs a team of committed and capable employees who can get the job done. But a team is not something that happens by itself. The process of team-building teamworkteambuilding-c-9.html) takes time and effort. The end result is to create a work environment in which every person feels like his or her contribution is a vital and valued part of the organization’s success.

We have put together a list of 5 Cs of effective team-building to help you on your way:

1. Clear expectations: One of the key characteristics of a successful team is clear role delineation of every team member – every person has to know the role he or she is expected to play in the company as well as the roles of the other team members. As the business owner, you have to ensure that every employee in your organization clearly understands how and where he/she fits in the organizational structure. Use organizational charts and staff meetings to facilitate this understanding.

2. Channels of communication: Create and maintain open channels of communication CommunicationIntro.htm) with your employees. This must not only be between you and your employees, but also among the staff. Create a working atmosphere such that your employees know that you are always available to listen to their concerns. Also encourage them to discuss genuine issues amongst themselves. Without free and unfettered communication, team-building is only a distant dream.

3. Conflict resolution: Getting a group of people to work together is not a bed of roses. There will invariably be times when the going gets rough and differences come out in the open. Develop conflict-resolution skills among your employees and create a mechanism for grievance redressal, if they can’t resolve their problems on their own. If necessary, arrange for professionals to conduct workshops on this subject.

4. Consequences: Make members feel responsible and accountable for team achievements. Enable them to understand that each individual contribution is a vital piece in the whole picture. At the same time, encourage individual creativity to blossom by instituting a system of rewards and recognition.

5. Celebrating achievements as a team: Give your team-building efforts a fillip by celebrating successes as a group. Since every employee plays an important part in the success or failure of your business, it only makes sense to celebrate your achievements as a team. Depending on the size of the achievement, your celebration can be as simple as a pizza party or as spectacular as a company trip to Hawaii.

Use these tips to ensure that the people who make up your small business work together as a team

Indisputable-Laws- towards the same goal. By empowering and instilling a sense of belonging in your employees, you will have created a successful team
that works hard to achieve the best results for you.

Project managers need to manage Their Boss

Alegik ThompsON — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 12:02:16 +0000

Most people have one. Yet attending to their demands and idiosyncrasies can be nerve-wracking. Wise people engage good boss management strategies. After all, bosses are not exalted and invincible gods. They are human beings with special roles and authority as well as the requisite levels of human weaknesses, problems and pressures.

Assess Leadership Style

Recognize leadership skills inherent in your own boss. This assists you to better understand your boss. You also benefit by becoming a better manager.

Leader #1: The Press Leader

These leaders pretend to be drill sergeants. Low self-esteem and a strong fear of failure drives them. They are impressed by outward displays of project management and busyness.rather than by results. The leader treats people as expeditors who obey orders. They tolerate no mistakes. Trivial details snare their energies and attention. They oversupervise and manage by punishment.

How to handle The Press Leader: Quickly discover on-the-job limits. Determine whether your boss is simply tough or ruthless. The tough leader precisely delegates authority balanced with appropriate responsibility. The ruthless one disregards human factors. If you choose to resist the press leader, do it privately, not within view of colleagues. This way your leader will not lose face. Support your position with plenty of evidence. Otherwise you lose.

Leader #2: The Laissez-Faire Leader

This leader abandons staff. These leaders provide little or no support in tough times. They stipulate little of what is expected of employees. They provide virtually no project management guidance on how to accomplish tasks. While the Press Leader may hover over an employee’s shoulder, this leader does nothing to train or guide. The Press Leader overmanages. The Laissez-Faire Leader overlooks.

Managing The Laissez-Faire Leader: The individual who is self-motivated and needs little praise will work well under this type of leader. This leader craves facts such as costs, statistics and research findings. Provide these facts and figures for your boss, while at the same time trying to stress some human elements. Encourage your boss to clarify exactly what is to be accomplished.

Leader #3: The Participatory Leader

The Participatory Leader is adept at communication procedures. Under this type of boss, employees are given precise feedback and recognition when deserved. The Participatory Leader strives to involve employees in the assessment process. He or she is inspirational and innovative. The Participatory Leader customizes the type and amount of feedback required for each employee.

Managing The Participatory Leader: The most effective way of dealing with the Participatory Leader is to feed back the same techniques that he or she uses with subordinates. Keep them informed of what does and does not work. Since this type of leader is interested in results, your opinions will be heeded.

Leader #4: The Develop Leader

This leader goes a step beyond the Participatory Leader. The Develop Leader fosters staff self-esteem, autonomy and competence. Techniques for success are isolated and taught to subordinates as the need arises. The Develop Leader empowers staff and nurtures a feeling of reverence, not in the boss, but in employees themselves.

There is often a high staff turnover rate for employees of develop leaders. But it is a good one because it is upward. Because this type of leader creates such a high level of competence amongst the ranks through professional development and project management, there is always someone to take over when someone moves up.

Keep Your Boss Happy

Learn what your boss expects and values.
Strive for high quality results.
Solve as many problems as possible without the help of your boss.
Keep your boss informed.
Be your strongest critic.
Get regular feedback from your boss.
Differ with your boss only in private.
Save money and earn revenue.
Be a good leader yourself.
Promote only valuable ideas.
After all. Your boss is not interested in the storms you encountered, but whether you brought in the ship.

Breaking a task into smaller pieces – WBS (Work Break Down)

Sheraz Alvi — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:57:51 +0000

Breaking Work into Task-Sized Chunks

When managing projects, it is important to build a WBS — a work breakdown structure. This article, the first in a three-part series, will explain why a WBS is important and show you how to build one. It is excerpted from chapter four of the book Microsoft Project 2007: The Missing Manual, written by Bonnie Biafore (O’Reilly, 2007; ISBN: 0596528361). Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission from the publisher. Available from booksellers or direct from O’Reilly Media.

When you organize a simple activity like seeing a movie with friends, you probably don’t bother writing out the steps. You just call your friends, pick a movie, get tickets, and buy popcorn without a formal plan. However, for more complex projects—like preparing your income tax return or launching a new product line—identifying the work involved is key to planning how and when to get it done. For example, missing the April 15 deadline can cost you hundreds of dollars in penalties. That new product may make a profit only if you keep costs below $100,000 and get it on the shelves before Thanksgiving. At such times, cost, delivery dates, and other objectives are important.

That’s where a WBS (work breakdown structure) comes in. Carving up the project’s work into a hierarchy of progressively smaller chunks until you get to bite-sized pieces is the first step to figuring out how and when everything will get done. If you’re new to managing projects, don’t panic—you’ve built a WBS before. The movie example in the previous paragraph is actually a simple WBS. The structure of a WBS is much like the system of blood vessels in your body, with the aorta representing the entire project and the smaller blood vessels as progressively smaller chunks of the overall work at each level (summary tasks). The hoards of tiny capillaries that deliver blood to every part of your body correspond to the individual tasks (called work packages) at the bottom of the WBS, which are the smallest chunks of work that you assign to people to complete the project.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to create a WBS that successfully communicates the work within a project. Equally important, you’ll learn how to tell when the WBS is broken down enough. The rest of the chapter helps you get your WBS into Microsoft Project, so you can proceed to constructing a project schedule as described in Chapter 6.

The fastest way to create a WBS is to construct it directly in Project, and this chapter shows you several ways to do just that. If you’re working alone, you can empty your brain into Project, or you can just as easily transcribe the results of collaborative WBS sessions. You can also build a WBS in Microsoft Word, and import the results into Project (in case you love working in Word, or teams submit individual Word documents for their portions of the project). Finally, you’ll also learn how to create documents that describe and support your project’s work packages.

Identifying the Work to Be Done

Knowing the high-level tasks that make up your project is important, but big chunks like Build Bridge, Hire New Staff, and Plan Grand Opening Party don’t help when you’re trying to estimate costs, line up resources, schedule work, or track progress. You need to get much more specific about the actual work all this is going to take. The point of a WBS is to break down the work into small enough pieces so you can do the following:

Improve estimates. Smaller tasks are not only less intimidating, they make it much easier to figure out how many people you need to perform each portion of work, how long it’ll take, and how much it’ll cost.
Keep the team focused. Because the WBS spells out exactly what’s needed to achieve the project’s objectives, it acts as a checklist for the work on the project team’s plate. And it also gently guides team members away from doing things outside the scope of the project

Assign work to resources. When the work is broken down into discrete tasks, it’s easier to identify the skills needed to complete the assignment. The project manager can clearly determine who’s responsible for what. Also, team members are more likely to understand their individual assignments, which makes them happy, and helps keep the project on track.On the other hand, don’t go overboard by dissecting work into miniscule assignments. Productivity drops when team members keep switching to new assignments while your temptation to micro-manage increases. (You’ll learn how to determine the appropriate size for a work package in the next section.)

Keep the project on track. Shorter tasks give you frequent checkpoints for tracking costs, effort, and completion dates. Moreover, if tasks have strayed off course, you can take corrective action before things get too far out of hand.

Breaking Down Work

Like Goldilocks, you have to find the right size for the work packages—not too big, not too small, but just right. Large work packages can be so vague that team members aren’t sure what they’re supposed to do. Moreover, your team could reassure you for weeks that a large chunk of work is running smoothly, only to beg for a schedule-busting extension just when you thought they’d be done. Too-small work packages, on the other hand, carry all the disadvantages of micromanagement: excessive communication, unending status reporting, lost productivity, and so on. So, how do you build a WBS with work packages that are just right?

Each project is unique, so don’t expect the same project management approach to work for every project you manage. Identifying work can run the gamut from invigoratingly informal to scrupulously methodical, depending on whether you’re planning a small project for a close-knit group or wrestling with a multi-year, multi-vendor project. (Whatever the project, a sure-fire shortcut is to borrow from existing sources, as described in the box below.)

UP TO SPEED

Borrowing a WBS

Even with input from all the stakeholders for the project, a blank WBS can be as daunting as the first blank page of the novel you want to write. Fortunately, several methods of developing a WBS let you learn—or even borrow outright—from the ideas and work of project managers who walked this path before:

Similar projects. If you know of a project that’s similar to the one you’re working on now, the fastest way to create a WBS is to use one that’s already finished, whether it’s stored in Project or another program. Be sure to check that project’s final schedule and its closeout documents (page 107) to identify work that was added during project execution.

Experienced resources. If people in your organization (or outside consultants and contractors, for that matter) have experience with your kind of project, they can help flesh out a WBS or identify work you’ve missed. You can write up the WBS as best you can, and then ask folks to look it over for you.

Microsoft Project templates. When you install Project, you automatically get a set of built-in templates for different types of projects, from technology deployments to residential construction (page 424). If these templates don’t meet your needs, Microsoft Office Online
(http://officemicrosoft.com)and other Web sites offer hundreds of specialized Project templates. Start with one of these templates to launch your WBS, altering it until it fits your project like a glove.

A WBS has only two types of elements: summary tasks and work packages. As you learned in Chapter 3, the lowest level of a WBS contains the work package tasks—hunks of actual work that you assign to team members. Anything else in a WBS is simply some level of summary of that work, which can nest to as many levels as you need, as shown in Figure 4-1. As it turns out, you can build a WBS from whichever direction you prefer—top down, bottom up, or side to side—as described in the following sections.

Figure 4-1. The organization of a WBS can vary, but the work packages remain the same. For example, you might track a project by phases (planning, design, and construction) or by completed components (from condo unit to floor to building). As you build a WBS, you can change summary tasks and move work packages around.

Building a WBS from the top down

As the name “work breakdown structure” implies, the most common way to build a WBS is to start with the entire project and break it down until you reach assignable work packages at the bottom. The most common way to decompose (that is, break down) a project is by the deliverables that you want the project to produce and the milestones you want it to attain. (See page 123 for a detailed definition of deliverables and milestones.)

A project scope statement (page 47) usually lists a set of deliverables that the project customer and other stakeholders expect to receive. One of the best ways to identify project work is to create high-level tasks for every project deliverable. For example, if you’re planning the party of the century, you’d create summary tasks for the tents and tables, the food, the drinks, the music, and the video you need to blackmail your friends after the fact.

Once you have these top-level tasks, you take another run at decomposition to identify intermediate deliverables and critical milestones, for instance, the completion of the celebratory rum cake or finalizing the reservations for all the party vendors. For each intermediate deliverable and milestone, ask yourself what work it entails. For instance, the music requires an audio system as well as a song list, so you add one task to rent the audio equipment and another to build a playlist of songs on your computer. Then, you simply repeat this process for each deliverable until you have work packages that you can assign to your spouse, your kids, the caterer, and other folks you hire. (See the box below for advice on effectively naming these tasks.)

Once you complete your WBS, take some time to verify it. Make sure all items in the scope statement have corresponding work on the WBS, and look out for work packages that don’t support the scope. Add missing summary tasks and work packages. If you think of a deliverable that isn’t on the scope statement, add the work to the WBS, and revise the scope statement. Keep in mind, though, if you’re doing projects for customers, you probably need their approval to change the scope statement.

GEM IN THE ROUGH

Good Task Names

The more a task name conveys the work it represents, the less you have to worry about whether team members are doing what they’re supposed to. Effective task names include a verb and noun–the action you want people to take and the result you expect.

Using the present tense of a verb presents the task as a command or directive. For example, “Write How-to Manual” clearly identifies the type of work and which deliverable the work applies to. “How-to Manual” doesn’t tell the assigned resources whether they are reading, writing, editing, or printing a how-to manual. Unambiguous verbs help clarify work. Instead of telling your partner to prepare the chicken for dinner, specify whether you mean frying, roasting, or breaking the bad news about life expedancy to the chicken.

You can help your audience interpret tasks by differentiating summary tasks, work packages, and milestones with different grammatical forms:

Because summary tasks represent a series of activities that span time, change the verbs for summary tasks to a gerund (a verb with “ing” at the end), like “Moving household goods.”

Milestones represent goals or states. A typical form for a milestone name is the deliverable and its state, such as Steel Columns Fabricated or Steel Columns Erected.

Taken from: http://www.aspfree.com