Old Skool Communication

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Communications Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Technology has brought tremendous advances in how we manage our projects, but in some areas it can hinder us. One area is communication, which has become increasingly a virtual activity. In pursuit of ease and volume, the quality of interactions is devalued, putting projects at greater risk.

Technology has made us all lazy communicators. Time was when communications had to be consciously planned — a scheduled meeting, a time to catch up over the phone, a trip for coffee. Informal communications still happened of course, but they weren’t the only face-to-face interactions that we had. Nowadays we expect to be able to reach out to someone at any time via e-mail or cell phone. There are people who will argue that this is a huge step forward because it allows communication to happen more immediately — someone can be handling e-mail from a train, talking on the phone in their car (hands-free, of course), etc., and issues can be raised and resolved far more quickly.

That’s true to an extent, but the amount of focus on the communication is far less — if you are talking while driving then the communication is not getting your full attention (I hope). For things like e-mail it’s even worse — a PM can fire off a bunch of e-mails in just a few minutes and then forget all about them until the replies trickle in. When the recipients get …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.