The Monthly Digest Had One Job
Communications planning for forty stakeholders outside the steering room, three operating modes, and one regulator who liked coffee meetings with the integrator.
Forty Stakeholders, No Mechanism
The Stakeholder Register (Post 03) tiered sixty stakeholders. The Engagement Plan (Post 04) built mechanisms for the twenty in Tiers 1 and 2. Forty stakeholders remained in Tiers 3 and 4 with labels but no operational communication mechanism. The program had been dispatching ad-hoc updates through the PMO for six weeks. It was not sustainable, and it was not governance.
The program manager booked a 45-minute meeting with Lena Marquez, Head of Corporate Communications at Atlas Bank, on 28 April. The meeting was supposed to be a handshake around scope. It became the first real test of whether Falcon’s governance discipline would survive contact with the bank’s existing communications governance.
Marquez was not being obstructive. The policy existed for good reasons. Atlas Bank had been burned in 2021 when an internal project update, forwarded to vendors, ended up quoted in a trade publication under a headline that misrepresented the bank’s strategy. Corporate Comms review was not gatekeeping; it was the mechanism the bank had built to prevent that kind of leak from happening twice. The PM understood the reasoning and could not accept the seven-day cycle.
Falcon’s monthly digest needed to dispatch on the first working day of each month. Seven-day review meant the digest draft had to be submitted at the end of the prior month, written three-plus weeks before the information reached the reader. In a program where steering decisions land on the first Thursday of each month (Post 04), the digest would never reflect the most recent steering. It would describe a program state that was already out of date by the time it reached forty stakeholders.
The alternative was no digest. That was worse. Without scheduled broadcast communication, stakeholders build their own information sources. Some of those sources would be wrong. Some would be leaked. One or more would be a journalist.
The program manager had ninety minutes between the Marquez meeting and the next steering 1:1 with Hassan to come back with a proposal Marquez’s team could defend and the program could execute. The proposal had to trade flexibility for speed, and it had to do it in a way that did not degrade the governance Marquez was there to protect.
Pre-Approved Templates. Three Operating Modes.
The PM’s proposal to Marquez, delivered in a second meeting on 30 April, had two moving parts.
Four dispatch templates, authored jointly by the PMO and Corporate Communications, reviewed once, and then blessed for ongoing use without per-dispatch review.
PMO-CC-001 Monthly Digest. Fixed three-section structure: What you need to act on / What you should be aware of / What has no action required. Locked regulatory language; approved stakeholder salutations. A digest that stays within the template dispatches from Hassan’s mailbox on the first working day without review.
PMO-CC-002 Quarterly Regulatory Briefing. For Market C regulator and central bank observers. Standard format; pre-approved by Compliance and Corporate Comms jointly.
PMO-CC-003 Incident Notification. For use in incident mode only. Pre-approved phrasing for the first 4 hours after a material incident; standing deck with fill-in fields rather than free-form drafting.
PMO-CC-004 Milestone Statement. Pre-approved language for major milestones (phase closures, certifications, go-live). External-ready on demand.
Anything that deviates from the template returns to the standard seven-day review.
A communications plan that is designed only for steady state fails the moment the program enters a non-steady state. Three modes locked into the plan, with explicit transition triggers and role ownership for each.
Steady Monthly digest, quarterly regulatory briefing, ad-hoc working group outputs. Template-driven, no review.
Incident Triggered by any material customer-facing outage, regulatory inquiry, or security event. 4-hour external response SLA via PMO-CC-003; Marquez owns external press; PM owns internal cascade; Okonkwo owns regulatory notification.
Regulatory heat Triggered by substantive inquiry or directive change from any of the three central banks. Monthly cadence shifts to fortnightly; Compliance working group outputs appended to digest; Sponsor briefing to board within 5 business days.
Marquez signed off on both parts within a week. The pre-approved template structure was exactly the mechanism her team had been trying to get program sponsors to accept for three years. Falcon was the first to ask for it.
The Coffee Conversations That Weren’t
On 6 May, Priya Raman mentioned something in a corridor conversation that should not have been a corridor conversation.
The PM booked twenty minutes with Amara Okonkwo the same afternoon.
Unofficial channels to regulators are not a communications inefficiency. They are a governance breach. The regulator builds a picture of the program from information that has not been reviewed by Compliance, filtered by Corporate Comms, or sanctioned by the Sponsor. When the regulator then asks a formal question of Atlas Bank based on what they heard informally, the bank is in the position of either confirming information it did not sanction or appearing to walk back from commitments its own integrator made. Both are bad. The second is worse, because it suggests the bank does not know what its own program is saying.
1. Restrict Volkov’s team, without embarrassing Volkov. The integrator had not done anything malicious. They were being helpful when a regulator asked. The restriction needed to read as program discipline, not as a reprimand. Hassan delivered it to Volkov in writing through the vendor working group: integrator personnel are not authorised to engage any regulator outside the Compliance working group, effective immediately. No reference to Market C specifically.
2. Route the regulator through an official channel. Okonkwo contacted the Market C regulator directly and offered a formal quarterly regulatory briefing (template PMO-CC-002) as the official program update mechanism. The regulator accepted. The coffee meetings stopped.
3. Document the mechanism, not the incident. The Communications Plan (next section) added an explicit clause: "All regulator engagement routes through the Compliance working group; no operational or vendor function engages regulators outside this channel without written sponsor approval." Positive framing. No reference to the Market C episode in any permanent artifact.
The episode took four business days to resolve end-to-end. It never reached steering. It never reached Marquez beyond a one-sentence acknowledgment in Okonkwo’s next compliance working group minutes. The central bank never knew it had happened. The integrator did not lose face. The program’s official communication position with Market C became stronger, not weaker, because the incident forced the creation of a formal briefing cadence that did not previously exist.
This is what good governance looks like in practice. Not the absence of problems, but the mechanisms that convert problems into structure before they become incidents.
Drafting the Communications Plan
The prompt below uses COAST: Context, Objective, Actions, Scenario, Task. The Scenario dimension is what earns COAST its slot here. Communications plans that design only for steady state fail the first time the program enters a non-steady state, which is always. Forcing the model to design for three scenarios (steady, incident, regulatory heat) produces a plan that holds in all three rather than a plan that holds in one.
Communications Plan Draft, Extract
The AI produced a plan covering all four tiers in three operating modes. Below is the Tier 4 steady-state extract and the flagged items at the end, which is where the human edits concentrated.
| Segment | Channel | Cadence | Owner | Approval |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adjacent Business Units (6) | Confluence + email | Monthly | PMO Lead | Pre-approved template |
| Regulatory Observers (6) | Email + Confluence | Monthly digest + quarterly briefing | Compliance | Pre-approved + CC review quarterly |
| Board Observers (5) | Quarterly briefing pack | Quarterly | Sponsor | Corporate Comms review |
| Internal Audit / HR / Corp Comms (5) | Monthly digest | Monthly | PMO Lead | Pre-approved template |
1. Tier 3 vs Tier 4 mechanism ambiguity. Current draft treats Tier 3 and Tier 4 with similar structure (monthly digest with variations). In practice, Tier 3 is issue-driven and reactive; they should receive digest only when relevant issues arise, not on a scheduled cadence. Separating the rhythms would reduce noise for Tier 3 members and tighten the digest content for Tier 4.
2. Mode transition triggers lack quantification. “Material customer-facing outage” is defined qualitatively. Consider specifying thresholds (e.g., outage >30 min affecting >5% users, or any regulatory inquiry in writing). Without quantified triggers, mode transitions depend on PM judgment, which may fail under time pressure.
3. Regulatory liaison governance not specified. The plan lists regulator segments but does not address who may engage regulators outside formal briefings. Consider adding explicit clause restricting informal regulator engagement to the Compliance working group.
Communications Plan v1.0, Extract
Published 9 May 2025. Three operating modes with audience segments, channels, owners, and pre-approved template references. Tier 4 shown in full across modes; Tier 3 summarised.
| Segment | Channel | Cadence | Owner | Template | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Tier 4 Adjacent Business 6 stakeholders |
Confluence + email | Monthly, 1st working day | PMO Lead (Hassan) | PMO-CC-001 | 30-min dispatch checklist before send; off-template dispatch = 7-day CC review. |
Tier 4 Regulatory Observers 6 stakeholders |
Email + Confluence | Monthly digest + quarterly briefing | Compliance (Okonkwo) | PMO-CC-001 / PMO-CC-002 | Market C regulator now receives formal quarterly briefing via PMO-CC-002. |
Tier 4 Board Observers 5 stakeholders |
Quarterly briefing pack | Quarterly | Sponsor (Idris) | PMO-CC-002 | Corp Comms reviews first briefing of each quarter; subsequent briefings dispatch under template. |
Tier 3 (all segments) 20 stakeholders |
On-demand (email, Confluence, WG meetings) | Issue-driven, not scheduled | Working group chairs | N/A (contextual) | Tier 3 receives communication when issues arise, not on a cadence. Separates rhythm from Tier 4. |
| Who | What | SLA | Template / Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corporate Comms (Marquez) | External press response | 4 hours | PMO-CC-003 pre-built briefing pack; standing deck. |
| Program Manager | Internal Tier 1–4 cascade | 2 hours from trigger | Incident digest via email + Confluence; Slack #falcon-steering simultaneously. |
| Compliance (Okonkwo) | Regulatory notification | Per directive SLA (30min typical) | Direct to central bank per incident class; formal filing follows within 24hrs. |
| Sponsor (Idris) | Board notification | Same business day | Direct to board chair; full board briefing within 48hrs if material. |
| Change from steady state | Mechanism |
|---|---|
| Monthly cadence → fortnightly | Digest and regulatory briefing frequency doubles; same templates. |
| Compliance WG outputs appended to digest | Full working group minutes included in Tier 4 digest for duration of heat mode. |
| Sponsor board briefing within 5 business days | Short-form briefing covering inquiry scope, response status, regulatory position. |
| Regulator engagement clause enforced | Only Compliance WG engages regulators. No operational, vendor, or technical function engages regulators without written Sponsor approval. |
The Monthly Digest, in Practice
- Separated Tier 3 and Tier 4 rhythm explicitly. AI flagged the ambiguity. PM moved Tier 3 to issue-driven reactive communication (no scheduled cadence) and Tier 4 to scheduled proactive broadcast. This cut the digest distribution list by a third and tightened Tier 4 content to genuinely actionable updates.
- Quantified incident-mode transition triggers. AI correctly flagged the soft language. PM added specific thresholds: outage >30min affecting >5% users, or any security event, or any regulator inquiry in writing. Mode transitions now do not depend on PM judgment under time pressure.
- Added regulator engagement clause. AI suggested this; Volkov’s coffee conversations made it urgent. Clause now explicit in both steady and heat modes: only Compliance WG engages regulators; no informal channels permitted.
- Negotiated four pre-approved templates with Corporate Comms. AI produced a generic "pre-approved template" concept. PM co-authored PMO-CC-001 through 004 with Marquez’s team, which removed the 7-day review cycle from 90 percent of Falcon dispatches and gave Corp Comms the standardisation they had been pursuing for three years.
On 17 October, a technology trade journalist contacted Atlas Bank’s Corporate Communications asking for comment on a rumour about a KYC integration issue at Falcon. The rumour had come from an industry source, not from inside Atlas Bank. Marquez’s team pulled the PMO-CC-003 incident briefing pack, filled three fields (current KYC status, R04 fallback activation state, certification timeline), and dispatched the bank’s statement in 3 hours 40 minutes. The statement reflected exactly what Atlas Bank had said in every monthly digest for the previous five months: the KYC pipeline was operating within the tolerance language documented in the program charter, with the async-with-real-time-failover design (Post 06) performing as expected. The story ran as a one-paragraph note confirming program progress, not as speculation. Marquez called it "the cleanest press response this bank has run in four years."
A fictional case study for teaching purposes. Atlas Bank, Project Falcon and all named individuals are invented. Technologies are industry-standard and publicly available.