Satish SharmaCertified SAP S4Hana 1909 Financials Expert| FreelanceNew Delhi, India
Project Communication comprises of sharing relevant information with the project stake holders as per the requirements of the project. This comprises of -
1. General information such as start, end of a project, task, activity , phase.
2. Specific information such as status update, progress and closure of the issue
3. Critical and situational information: Such as Cutover, Going Live, and Change of Team or Resource composition
there are other contents which might be covered in communication, we can have discussion here... Saving Changes...
This is a wide area and hard to asnwer in a short response. There are two points I like to mention here:
(1) Communication is like the machine-oil for a project: You need it continuosly and should be focus topic 1 for you as PM.
(2) We as human beings are very, very bad in communication. It is in our nature, that we communicate on the basis of our own imagination of the as-is, our filtered view on the communication topic. We all have a kind of "filter" in our brain that meant is not said, said is not heard and heard is not understand between sender und receiver.
As a consequence it is a life-long learning to improve the own "brain-filter" in our communications in order to avoid miscommunication and conflicts resulting from this. Saving Changes...
NEHRU NAGAPPANPM Consultant| Project Leadership AcademyShah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia
lets not forget / ignore importance of non-verbal / body language as a tool for communication. Saving Changes...
Vishakha SharmaPMP, PSM, Sr Project Manager, Agile and Scrum, Delivery Manager| Artha Learning, Swiftwin, Tech Mahindra Ltd, Upside Learning Solutions Pvt LtdPune, Maharashtra, India
Identify the stakeholder and understand what they are looking for from the project. What communications are they interested in. One would be the planned communications - you will send out updates / statuses to stakeholders / team at a particular interval, on a specific date and time, in a pre-defined format. Other communications can be the ones which happen during a project and the PM needs to know whom is this information to be shared with. Here again the stakeholder list plus the escalation matrix will be useful to decide to whom the communication should go.
Apart from status, dates, resources, other communication contents can be -
Changes - accepted as well as rejected, Feedback, Meeting minutes, Change in policies (can be legal policies, company policies) and so on. Saving Changes...
Lonnie PacelliAuthor & President| ProjectManagementAdvisor.comBellevue, Wa, United States
A common mistake is where either everyone remotely associated sees everything (over communication) or stakeholder groups don't get timely relevant information. Also important is communication changes when problems occur. Many times PMs stop communicating when crisis happens, creating angst amongst the stakeholders.
Think in terms of who, what, when, why, how:
Who needs to be communicated?
What do they need to know?
When (frequency) do they need to be communicated?
Why is the communication important to them, i.e. what happens if communication doesn't occur?
How do you communicate (email, status meeting, 1:1, etc.)
A simple grid with these items as the columns and the stakeholder groups as the rows work well. Just keep it simple and BE CONSISTENT. Don't go dark; when you go dark stakeholders tend to make up their own version of what's going on. Saving Changes...
