Team Members: The PM's Critical Communications Channel

Suvrutt is a seasoned information technology and industrial automation professional, with 30+ years of experience in information technology and industrial electronics

  Communications Management   Estimating   Lessons Learned   Risk Management   Stakeholder Management  

Many times, project leadership gives a great deal of attention to project communications with senior management, customers and sponsors. They are clearly very important stakeholders. However, in order to make the project and all these stakeholders successful, the project manager needs to diligently nurture one more channel: project communications to and from project team members.

As indicated in the diagram below, this article focuses on strengthening the communication channel with project team members, with discussion of:

1. Importance and benefits
2. Reasons why project managers need to put in extra effort—and what proactive steps a project manager needs to take

The article is based on the theme that a project manager’s upward communication to senior management, customers and sponsors depends a great deal on how precisely and timely a project team on the ground captures and reports information and data. Unless a testing engineer captures how much actual time he took for the power transformer commissioning or challenges he faced, the improvements for the next time—along with effective metrics—cannot be built.

Figure 1: Stakeholders in project communications

Why the Communication Channel with Project Team Members Is Vital for Project Success
A …

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