Information, Utterances, and Understanding - The Emergent Model of Project Management Communication

 

In the last three years, I have undertaken an intensive study of project management communication as it is portrayed in academic research. Using two complementary research methods, deductive qualitative analysis and qualitative content analysis, I examined 272 journal articles published between 1970 and 2016 to determine how academic researchers defined and investigated project management communication.

I found that many researchers conceived of project management communication as "information transfer" (the "transmission model"). The transmission model was and is still the dominant perspective. However, since 2010, there have arisen new project management communication models that build upon the transmission model by adding the emergent dimension of understanding (the "emergent model").

In the research, my research partner and I have demonstrated how deductive qualitative analysis paired with qualitative content analysis can cast new light on the academic research into project management communication that indicates how the evolution of project management can influence the evolution of communication practices in managing projects. It is our hope that our research will inform and benefit both the project management academics and practitioners.

Our next research project is to study practitioner-initiated research into project management communication. We hypothesize that practitioners will have adopted the emergent model of project management communication to help them to better manage today's projects.