Go with the Flow: Sharing Project Management Knowledge

Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].

  Governance   Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

If the answer is 3,916, what is the question? If I provide you with the algorithm used to calculate this number, many of you will immediately recognize what it was I was trying to find an answer to:

n(n-1)/2

This formula appears in the Communication Requirements Analysis section (10.1.2.1) of A Guide to the Project Management Book of Knowledge PMBOK Guide—Fifth Edition. Whether any of us use this formula on a regular basis or not, it is illustrative of the total number of dyadic relationships (or individual-to-individual communication channels) that potentially exist among all of the stakeholders within a project.

As an input to communication management planning, this simple if blunt assessment is, according to PMBOK Guide, “an indicator of the complexity of a project’s communications.” In this particular example, the number of individual stakeholders was 89. If we reduce this number by around 10% (to 79 stakeholders), the total number of potential dyadic connections drops by over one-fifth (or 835 connections) to 3,081.

Although it is indicative of the magnitude of communication complexity inherent in a group of project stakeholders, this number does not tell us very much, if anything, about how complex the actual information flows are among and between stakeholders--which is a much more useful piece of information if we want to …

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