The statistics show that a project
manager spends more than 90% of the working time communicating. In
addition, a poor communication is considered a common cause for the
project failure. Therefore it is very important to have a good
communication in your project.
But how to ensure that the
communication is properly done? A good idea is to do some planning
for your communication. The plan shall cover what information to
distribute, to whom, when, how and how often you need to distribute
an information.
In the first step you need to
determine what is needed to be distributed and to whom. Thus you have
to determine the project stakeholders and to analyze what information
do they need. This is the most complex step and requires a lot of
attention.
In the next step you have to
determine when and how often you have to deliver the information.
That is also dependent by the stakeholder's needs. For example you
can send to the upper management or to the customer an weekly report,
other stakeholders may be notified only when a milestone is reached.
Very important is also the modality of
information distribution. Thus in some cases you have to use a
formal communication (written or verbal) and in other cases an
informal communication (written and verbal). The choose between
formal and informal communication is dependent by what you need to
communicate and to whom you communicate.
Also the communication technology is
very important, especially in the projects with virtual teams. An
important factor in choosing the communication technology is the
urgency of the communication and the availability of the technology.
Not many project managers are using a
communication plan. Maybe for a smaller project with only a few
stakeholders, a communication plan is not compulsory. But for a
medium to large project, a communication plan is essential for the
project success. A larger scale project has a big number of
stakeholders and not providing the right information at the right
moment can have important consequences and is a potential source of
conflict.
