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Articles To help Project Leaders |  |
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Optimize your Project CommunicationsWhat image comes to your mind when you think of about communication skills for Project Managers? Typically, we only think of verbal communications when we discuss of communication skills for Project Managers. We picture a Project Manager giving a status report to the Project Sponsor and steering committee in a board room. However, a project manager communicates with many stakeholders in a myriad of other formats and channels every day.
Communication can be defined as the exchange of thoughts and information through verbal, written or other channels. In the modern world we communicate verbally and electronically, although smoke signals can also be considered a communication channel outside of the modern office.
The preponderance of project communication comes from the project manager and travels to recipients such as project team members and steering committee members. The most overlooked form of communication is from team members to the project manager. Unless project managers inquire about project challenges and discuss the project informally outside of status meetings, project team members are not giving the maximum amount of input to the project manager, which prevents optimum project performance.
Let's go beyond the basic communication flow where project managers report status to everyone listed on the communications plan. Have you considered these scenarios as project communication channels that will drive your project to optimum performance? As project manager, how can you make sure that your project artifacts are supporting these scenarios and enabling your team to communicate with you?
1. Remote team members who refer to your project plans, issues logs and risk mitigation plans to see what is coming up without delving into this in team meetings.
2. Team members who want to check their understanding of their assigned tasks, and see how their tasks fit into the larger project.
3. Team members who review project plan components of tasks assigned to other teams, and notice discrepancies or errors. These are the thoughts that you get at 3 AM when you realize that a task doesn't fit in, or has been neglected.
4. Team members who are completing a task and report the task as completed which highlights a discrepancy or ambiguous task description on your project plan.
As a project manager, you should keep your project artifacts current. Your team members can use the project artifacts in a more ways than they were originally intended to cross check the project tasks. These checks and balances help your project team to help you optimize project team performance.
Your project management documents serve more than just one purpose. Your Project Plan primarily communicates tasks and resources. Make sure that it also confirms understanding of tasks and helps your team members to help you see blind spots.
Project management communications typically originate from the project manager stake holders. However, as project manager, you should also encourage the flow of communications towards yourself by creating project artifacts such as a project plan and milestone checklists to help your project team help you manage your project to success.
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Improve your project management and communication skills by visiting www.waynebotha.com. Wayne Botha grew up in South Africa and now lives in Connecticut, USA. Wayne is a project leader, speaker and author. Colleagues and audiences frequently tease Wayne about his funny accent.
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