4 Tools for Preventing Communication Chaos
Lenka Pincot, Chief of Staff, PMI
We all hear about the importance of communication. However, communication on projects has specific challenges. It takes place not just within a team, but outside of the team, formally and informally—and involves colleagues across the organization with various expertise and backgrounds. Is it even possible to find a common language for everyone?
We all talk, but do we communicate?
Communication is a common part of our daily lives both at work and at home. We talk, we write, we smile and we frown, we use gestures. But the basic skills of communication can be taken for granted, and poor communication is often at the top of project failure statistics.
It always seems like there is a straightforward solution—we will make a commitment to communicate more often and better. But in a complex project implementation environment, it isn’t so easy. Let's look at some specifics of project communication and why its failure can cause chaos.
Project communication: a continuous chain
Project communication covers a wide range of information sources and recipients, who are involved in the project to varying degrees. Some require a continuous flow of communication, while others are only focused on a specific area (such as financial reporting of a project). Others enter the communication chain at random.
Many project success factors depend on a good …
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