Managing Project Communications

Who are the most important people in your project? Your stakeholders.

These are the people that will determine whether your project will fly or flop. These are the people who will tell you what, when and how they want what they want. They will tell you why they want what they want. Sometimes, they don’t really know what they think they want. Bottom line, these are the people whose needs and wants must be addressed, analysed and fulfilled.

The PMBOK Guide has one knowledge area dedicated specifically for stakeholders. And it has all to do with communicating; Project Communications Management. This is the knowledge area where processes required to ensure information are generated, distributed, stored and later disposed of. This knowledge area also tells us how and why who gets what information when.

Within the process Initiating process group, we will identify the stakeholders. We will be able to categorise our stakeholders and later disseminate information according to priorities.

Planning communication comes next under the Planning process group. During this process, we will answer the question: How and Why Who gets What information When.

In the Executing process group, we will distribute relevant information based on the plan that we have created in the previous process. We will also manage stakeholder expectation; which means we will communicate effectively to meet their needs and addressing any issues that is happening.

Throughout the project lifecycle, we will be reporting the project performance to the stakeholders. This task falls under the Monitoring and Controlling process group. Here information is collected and the project performance is presented in ways of status reports and forecast.

Remember that communication can be in many ways; internal or external, verbal or non-verbal, written or oral, formal or informal, vertical or horizontal, official and non-official. Each project team member must be equipped with the right skills to communicate effectively, within the team or with other stakeholders. When wearing a project manager’s hat, we are not only communicating project progress, we will also be required to do negotiation, conflict resolving, educating, managing expectations, etc.

Didn’t we already come to terms that project manager spends most of her time communicating?  Thus, we better make sure that we do it excellently!

 

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