Communication Plan Template for Excel

There isn’t much to building a communication plan template, but having one and using one in your project is priceless. Communication Plans are essential in managing a project, and can be used in any initiative you are working on. Getting communication out clearly and effectively is what a Project Manager is, simple as that. I read somewhere once that communication is 90% of what a Project Manager does. Well, I guess you can debate that (I do), but regardless you have to acknowledge the fact that communication plays a big part in managing a project.

That said, I’ve put together this simple yet effective Communication Plan template in Excel so you can quickly organize all the channels you need to provide information to as part of your project. You can quickly organize who the type of communication, what the purpose is, who the audience is, the delivery method, and more.

As always, this template is free for use and hope you enjoy!

Availability: Tested in Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013
Features: Keep track of all your issues for your project by status, criticality, health, and much more!
Functionality: The portfolio table is made of Excel tables, recent additions to Excel as of 2007.

This template has pretty basic functionality, and is intended more from a use perspective in a simplified fashion. Or in other words, your communication plan is rarely looked at from a status perspective. In fact, it should rarely have to be changed once you have the plan signed off and approved. After this occurs, you should store this document in your project records and distribute to your project team so they are aware of the channels in which communication should be distributed and in which fashion. This effectively puts it as a reference document.

That said, the template has been purposely kept to be very simple and clean, with little user interaction. It’s pretty simple in fact. Fill in the content, save it, distribute it, then manage your project and communicate to the methods in the template.

As always though, if you have any comments or questions please feel free to post below. In addition, if you have any suggestions on how to improve this then feel free to post those as well. Enjoy!

Tags: CommunicationMS ExcelPlanningProjectsTemplate