vskMost project fail due to communication issues, project communication management ensures that right information, is passed on to right stakeholder at right time and right format.
Project communication management answers following questions
- What? is the format of communication
- When? time & frequency of communication.
- Why? its communicated e.g. objective of communication.
- How? its communicated e.g. Communication technology to be used.
- Who? is responsible for communication.
Project communication management has 3 processes
- Plan communication – Answers questions how,why,when,how and who. Which is documented in Communication management plan.
- Manage Communication – Once plan is created, ensures timely and appropriate collection, creation, distribution, storage, retrieval, management, monitoring, and the ultimate disposition of project information.
- Monitor communication – Ensures communications are going out as planned, message is received by proper stakeholder and message is understood.
Plan Communications
- An effective communications management plan that recognizes the diverse information needs of the project’s stakeholders.
- Project communication starts early during stakeholder identification and project management plan.
- Plan communication should be reviewed regularly throughout the project and revised.
- Analysis of stakeholder communication needs helps determining the right communication technology, right communication method, identify barriers such as cross cultural communication, difference in communication styles, age, nationality, languages, right format and timing.
- Understanding and enhancing communication model can assist in developing person to person and small group communication.
Manage Communications
Ensure that the information being communicated to project stakeholders has been appropriately generated and formatted, and received by the intended audience.
Effective effective communications management include
- Remove barrier
- Choice media – e.g. when to use push vs pull communication.
- Writing style – Appropriate use of active versus passive voice, sentence structure, and word choice
- Meeting Management – planning right participants, dealing with conflicts, follow up minutes or actions.
- Presentations – body language, design of visual aids
- Facilitation – building consensus and overcoming obstacles
- Active listening – Listening actively involves acknowledging, clarifying and confirming, understanding, and removing barriers
Monitor Communications
- Monitor Communications determines if the planned communications artifacts and activities have had the desired effect of increasing or maintaining stakeholders’.
- Monitor Communications may require a variety of methods, such as
- customer satisfaction surveys,
- collecting lessons learned,
- observations of the team,
- reviewing data from the issue log,
- or evaluating changes in the stakeholder engagement assessment matrix
- The Monitor Communications process can trigger an iteration of the Plan Communications Management and/or Manage Communications processes to improve effectiveness of communication