"Heads will roll, if you're over budget
and off schedule again."

The Situation:
The senior managers of a power generation plant were under pressure from corporate headquarters. For many years the plant had been considered a jewel-in-the corporate crown because of consistent, impressive contributions to earnings. However, the contributions unraveled and highlighted the plant's operating shortcomings. 

It had become routine for the plant to end each year over budget and with only some of its planned work completed on schedule. Department managers rarely worried about meeting spending projections. Corporate saber rattling about budgets and schedules had been down-played over the years--as long as 'the numbers' remained on target. Times changed. The corporate chairman warned the plant's senior managers, "Heads will roll, if you're over budget and off schedule again."

A business plan promise
Long before the final warning, the plant's senior managers had identified a need to upgrade all management processes. They had further identified internal communication as "the management process most critical to improving all other management processes." The site's communication manager was assigned the task of implementing an operations-based, employee communication process within six months. The not-yet-identified employee communication process was highlighted and promised to corporate headquarters in the plant's business plan for the next year. 

Question:
If you had been the plant's communication manager, what would you have done? 

Look at What Happened?

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