The Dangerous Growth of Communication Assumptions

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  

We all know that when the pandemic hit, work changed fundamentally. Organizations moved their communication and collaboration online as remote work became the norm, and we all became incredibly familiar with one or more of the electronic work management platforms.

In project management, there has also been some significant growth in the use of project portfolio management or PPM tools. In some cases, that was simply broader adoption of tools that organizations already had; in others, it was the decision to invest in new or upgraded tools that could better integrate with those online collaboration platforms.

As a result, project managers and team members now frequently have access to a lot more information than they did in the past. Their dashboards give them key information, they can run reports to gain more insight, and key project messaging and communication material is just a click away. That’s a positive development, but it doesn’t come without risks.

Just because it’s there…
Despite the easier and more immediate access that team members have to their information, I still find myself working with clients who are experiencing communication problems across their portfolio of projects. In fact, I think that it has increased in the last two or three years. And there are several reasons for that, largely based on assumptions about the ability …

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