Who hears what, and why
Audience and frequency are easy. Purpose is the field that requires a decision — and the one that stops a meeting outliving its usefulness by a year.
Who hears what, how often, and why
The purpose column is the one worth arguing about — it is what stops a meeting outliving its usefulness by a year.
The plan
The matrix
Gaps
What is checked
- Missing owner — an error. A communication nobody owns does not happen.
- Missing purpose, channel or frequency — a warning.
- A stakeholder with nothing addressed to them — a warning.
- Everything on one cadence — a note. A sponsor and a delivery team rarely want the same thing at the same interval.
- One person owning most of it — a warning. That is a single point of failure for the project's whole information flow.
Purpose is the field that matters
Audience, channel and frequency are easy to fill in. Purpose is the one that requires a decision, and it is the one that gets left as "to update stakeholders" — which is a description of the activity rather than a reason for it.
A communication with a stated purpose can be judged: is this still achieving that? One without a purpose runs until somebody cancels it out of frustration, usually about a year after it stopped being useful.
Different audiences, different rhythms
When every line says "weekly", the plan was filled in rather than thought about. A sponsor may need fifteen minutes a month and an escalation route; a delivery team needs something daily; a regulator needs something precise and infrequent.
One owner is a bottleneck
When the project manager owns every communication, all information flows through one person — and stops entirely when they are on leave. Distributing ownership is also how other people come to understand the audiences they are writing for.