Is Anybody Listening?

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  

Nurturing a work environment that fosters communication among teams, managers and stakeholders is an undisputed key to success. But some leaders focus too much on requiring a steady stream of detailed reports and too little on context. After a while, this frenetic approach to “communication” just becomes noise.

A friend of mine recently told me about a challenge she was facing at work. A program manager had left just as her project was ramping up. She and colleagues had been working closely with the program manager and were struggling with the appointment of a new program manager. The program manager was not new to the organization, but was new to the business, with a limited knowledge of the work that was being undertaken. He was also a relatively inexperienced program manager and was keen to prove his capability. Perhaps most telling, he had been briefed by the sponsor on how critical the program was and how important it was to get up to speed very quickly.

The challenge for the team centered around the way that this new program manager was communicating. The program manager was asking for a huge amount of detail on project progress, and was providing far more detail from other areas of the program than the project team had received in the past. Additionally, the program manager was unable to provide, or fully understand, the context for the information because he didn&…

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