Earning a Leg Up with Distribution Lists

Ask someone for advice on how to “move up” in corporate America and you are bound to hear “work yourself out of a job”, by which they mean train someone else to do what you do so you can move on to presumably bigger things.  While good advice, “work yourself out of job” does NOT give you anything particularly actionable - especially as a project manager where more than 90% of your job is communication - to complete.  But that is why we have distribution lists.  Using an E-mail inbox as a queue for work items has its pitfalls, but why not build distribution lists as a means to leave your replacement established communication channels?

 

Early in your role as a project manager set up a distribution list that goes to the [blank] Project Manager, or the PMO, or the solution or product owner.  During the project, establish the distribution list as a choke point for communication.  Set up repetitive and periodic communication to email the distribution list instead of your individual email address.  If you are managing systems, set up one list for the “system owners” or “system maintainers” which is for human readable communication.  Set up one distribution list for the system users or project consumers so you (and your successor) have a single address to communicate.  It is also helpful to set up two distribution lists: One list for informational emails that might have statistics that you need to check in on from time to time.  The second for “Alert” emails; things that require the team or the PM to react.  On large projects with multiple executive sponsors or a steering committee, it may also be helpful to establish a distribution list for status reporting.  The main driver in establishing multiple incoming distribution lists (human readable, informational, and alerting) is because you can configure email endpoints (outlook, blackberry, iPhone) to present information differently; highlighting alert emails (vibrating your blackberry) and ignoring the arrival of informational items.

 

Once you have incoming and outgoing communication established via distribution lists you can begin transitioning your role to your successor by adding them to the distribution lists.  You can speed things along by creating a playbook for what should happen when particular emails are received and document the communications the PM or system owner is expected to send and when.  If you are particularly ambitious, you can include a link to a Wiki page that allows the future receiver to update the playbook as change occurs.  Wiki pages contained in alert emails are a particularly helpful way to build an institutional error response and recovery playbook.