Can We Talk? Improving Project Communications

 

The process of communication is an elusive one. Ask anyone what communication means and we conjure up ideas from hardware to the simple communication models we learned throughout our lives: there is a sender, the message, filters, the receiver. But how do we improve the process of communication on our projects?

Communication will make or break a project. When a famous comedian uses the catch phrase "Can we talk?" it is usually about a problem which could have been prevented with proactive communication management.

The Project Management Institute's Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) defines Communications Management as one of the nine knowledge areas. The PMBOK was written in the experience gained through the blood, sweat and tears of its authors. It defines several processes to effectively manage project communications and is certainly worth referring to as a starting point. These processes include: communications planning, information distribution, performance reporting and administrative closure.

One way to improve the process of communications on your project is to create a communication plan to define:

• Stakeholders
• The Message desired by each category of stakeholders
• The Method of transmission of the communication
• The Periodicity of that communication
• Where the communication content is stored

Stakeholders
While there are many …

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