Communication, Communication and Communication but how?

How about a phone call? :)

Do they know it is critical, why, and when you need this information by? Were you explicit? Did you share your team's assumption with an 'unless I hear back with something different, the project will continue forward with ....."

Of course, there is the path of escalation as well.

If possible, schedule an on-site visit. (not sure the geographic dispersion of the everyone)

Otherwise, sharing a communication plan at the beginning of the project will at least help to share expectations and expose the what, why, how, when in advance.

Milind -

Adding to Andrew's suggestions - take your Sponsor's help and try to schedule steering committee meeting to review the project progress & risks/issues. It will help to gain visibility into the missed milestones and will bring things to Senior management's focus.

How about a phone call? :)

Do they know it is critical, why, and when you need this information by? Were you explicit? Did you share your team's assumption with an 'unless I hear back with something different, the project will continue forward with ....."

Of course, there is the path of escalation as well.

If possible, schedule an on-site visit. (not sure the geographic dispersion of the everyone)

Otherwise, sharing a communication plan at the beginning of the project will at least help to share expectations and expose the what, why, how, when in advance.

What are the personal consequences when dates are missed? If people are not concerned about meeting the dates given them, then there is something else going on with them. Are the date unrealistic? Are the people not invested in the project? Is there a lack of team motivation?
Often management communicates in one direction only. They do all of the talking and none of the listening. Then employees start to shut them out.
There is no "Out of the Box" solution. It is all about working closely with all of the people involved, getting buy-in on the decisions, listening when it looks like a date may slip, being open to making adjustments, understanding motivations.

It is not about communication. Is about culture. Believe me, I am working in highly distributed, multi-cultural multi-country, highly risk (them expected time to deliver is crazy) strategical initiatives from 1990 up to date and is not about communication. In fact, in my actual work place where I am working from 8 years ago, I never met face to face to more thatn 80% people I am working on. And teams are hugh teams because all Latin America and most of the time USA, Europe and Asia Pacific are part of the initiative. On the other side I was in charge to all related to process and governance. So, what we do is a short conference call (30 minutes or less) one time per week (depending on the initiative it could be 2-3 times) with the aim to help people to do they work (all people are working on multitasking mode). In the mine time we use Skype for Buisiness and MS Outlook plus we use a corporate tool to put there all related to progress. But let me say again: no matter that is about Culture where Cultuere start from the top management. And always remember: is not your project, is the company and mainly the sponsor project.

Girija Thanks.

Here manager facing communication issue. All key stakeholders are in loop including senior management. Complete clarity brought in. Cross checked. But still.