Project managers realize an engaged and supportive sponsor is instrumental in ensuring project success. However, many PMs struggle with building a collaborative relationship with the sponsor. This article presents three sponsor/project management relationship concepts.
Your project sponsor can be the crucial factor in an intervention to keep your project moving. Unfortunately, the same sponsor is monitoring multiple competing initiatives. How can you compete with that when you need help?
Leaders are visually oriented, yet they still get accosted by slides that are walls of words. To be persuasive, you must be better at illustrating key points. Here’s how to use a diagram from the quality management area for high impact.
Taking a lesson from the automobile industry, some project managers have found ways to improve project team and stakeholder communications through the use of tools that help people better visualize the status of projects and related issues. Here is a primer on Visual PM--its origins, use and more...
On projects where you have more than a handful of issues, it is helpful to have a log that you can use to easily track and understand the status of an each one. The log keeps issues at a very high-level while the details are left to the project issue identification form. Project Issue logs are often used on medium to larger projects.
An integral part of a success project is communication. What do you say and to whom? When do you say it? How? Through what media?
This template allows the project manager to fully understand the communication needs of stakeholders on the project. Stakeholders expectations and requirements can be documented ensuring there is a clear understanding of the why, when, how and what of the project’s communications.
Communication is one of the most critical success factors on a project and a strong communication plan will go a long way towards creating a structure of effective communication with all stakeholders. This template provides some basic fields common to all plans but also helps identify each stakeholder’s specific needs.
This template is designed to assist the project manager with planning timely project communications on critical but sensitive topics. Message details can be listed and timing of delivery to specific groups can be scheduled. The appearance of "covering up" or communicating only to favored groups can thus be avoided. Missed communications can also be avoided.
The project brief outlines what is to happen in the initiation phase of a project. A project brief is particularly useful in making a decision to proceed or not with the proposed project.
This simple communication plan lists your stakeholder communication and training strategies to inform project participants and get them up to speed about your project and its outcomes.
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"Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true." - Francis Bacon |
