Hello to fellow project management professionals! I hope you are enjoying this blog. Today’s topic is focused on communication management and its importance within project management. I hope you find this post insightful!
Communication is one of the main essences of project management. Without communication, it will be impossible for stakeholders to be aware of how a project is going. As a project manager, it is important to regularly keep all stakeholders updated. There are several forms of communication that a project manager should conduct throughout the life cycle of a project:
- Weekly status reports: Weekly status reports may sound cliché. However, for project managers, I believe its an essential report that provides the entire project team, business stakeholders and executive stakeholders with a pulse level view of how the project is progressing. At a minimum, the project manager should prepare a weekly report that provides details on tasks completed the previous week, the tasks that will be completed in the upcoming week, risks/issues that are of concern to the project team, key decisions and action items that were completed over the past few days and that need to be made in the upcoming week, project budget/actuals, and overall schedule/plan progress.
- Executive communications: At an executive level, project managers should prepare a high level summary of the project that executive stakeholders can receive on a regular basis so that they understand the overall progress of the project. Usually, stakeholders can be updated weekly or bi-weekly depending on the preference. Every set of executive stakeholders have different expectations of what they may want to see. It is important to have regular check ins with the executive stakeholders to understand what they may want to expect from a report perspective and understand what they believe is important for receiving regular updates.
- Steering committee communications: As a project manager, you may or may not have a steering committee for a project. Usually, a steering committee is assigned to high visibility and/or high value projects. As a project manager, it is important to come up with a regular cadence to update steering committee stakeholders on how the project is going. As a project manager, it is important to define what the level of involvement of the steering committee will be at the initial stages of a project. In a typical scenario, the steering committee is responsible for helping with decision facilitation and/or escalation purposes. At times, there can be risks/issues within a project that impact other areas of the organization, and may not be limited to the scope of the original project. In these cases, the steering committee may go to the business users/leaders of the potentially impacted areas to confirm their awareness and obtain buy-in of the project’s impact to the overall business area impacted.
- Business user communications: as a project manager, it is important to keep all of the business user community aware of how the project is going. In many cases, the business users may receive a monthly email on how the project is progressing along with the weekly status reports. The business users will be the people who will most likely use the systems/processes in the future state so its important to regularly engage them.
- Project team communications: The project team should have regular communication to stay on track. In many cases, I have seen the project manager schedule a daily checkpoint with the project team to better understand how the various workstreams of the project is going. What I have seen as an effective approach is conducting a daily stand up with the entire project team to see how each individual on the project team is doing, any blockers that they are facing, overall progress on their tasks, and any potential risks/issues that may be coming within their work area.
Based on all of the various forms of communication, it is the project manager’s responsibility to make sure that all the right stakeholders are aware of how things within the project are going as well as bring up any risks/issues to the key stakeholders for support on these areas. At times, the executive stakeholders can also help resolve the potential risks and issues.
What are the communication strategies that you utilize to manage your team? Leave us a comment with your tried and true strategies below!