Posts Tagged ‘communication’

Last week I asked the question, "Is email the best way for project teams to communicate?"

Of the responses I received, the most animated response regarding email came via a comment to another post I’d made regarding the recent Gartner Summit in San Diego, It’s All About People. Julien got pretty excited about a comment made by Mark Langley of the PMI, "The younger generation doesn’t use email—it’s all about texting and mobile technology."

"Let’s all jump on the networking bandwagon, and forget in the process that mobile devices handle emails just fine. So the younger generation doesn’t use email anymore, huh? Somebody warn Google, quick—let them know that Gmail is a dead-end. Also, since when did companies undergo a revolution in their infrastructure for the sake of the latest interns? It’s going to be a while before emails disappear, if they ever do, so don’t go burying your Outlook just yet," says Julien.
I remember when email first entered the workplace. I thought it was just another excuse not to talk to people. Face-to-face communication by the way, was considered by those who responded to my question as the "best way" to communicate. There is no doubt that face-to-face communication is the best way to communicate about most things. However, in the context of capturing project-related communication to facilitate collaboration or create an audit trail, face-to-face communication does have a few weaknesses (my ability to accurately capture notes and my memory of the myriad conversations I have about work every day being just two of them—and I don’t think I’m the only one that struggles with them either).

Returning from Japan this week, the weakness of email has been staring me in the face for the last couple of days. While on the road, I make it a priority to try to manage my in-box and address all those emails that are of a critical nature, putting off the others until I return and have the time to sift through the backlog (which after a week on the road is rather overwhelming). What’s more, I don’t think I’m alone. Email, although a critical part of how I communicate with my colleagues, is not the most efficient way to capture project-related communication. Most of us are making daily determinations about what email we really need to read right now, what email can be put off and even what email can be ignored—not to mention the email threads that get lost or misinterpreted. Which brings me to the premise of today’s discussion.

While in Japan I spent some time visiting customers and met a very brilliant project leader for Toyo Engineering who told us about how she has eliminated project-related emails within her organization using AtTask. She shared how communication that takes place within the software is captured and available for review and comment much more easily than email; and can be coded and sorted by project, making it easy to reference previous conversations and incorporate comments into reports, etc.

Her objectives have been to eliminate the information that gets lost, forgotten or misplaced when conversations about projects and tasks take place within disparate tools like email or outside of any structure at all, like conversations that rely on memory. I’m looking forward to continued dialog with her to learn more about how she took this leap and the results she’s getting, but in the mean time, I’m convinced that if you rely on email as your collaboration medium you aren’t working with the best tool.

On a final note, Julien asks, "…since when did companies undergo a revolution in their infrastructure for the sake of the latest interns?" If we had taken this attitude when email was first introduced, I’d still be using my IBM Selectric and carbon paper. Adapting to current communication trends just makes sense to me. How we incorporate them within our project teams probably depends most upon the team—however, utilizing metaphors that are accessible and easily understood seems to be the best approach as far as I’m concerned. If that means abandoning email like my new friend in Japan, I think that’s a decision I can support.

What are you doing to encourage communication and collaboration in a way that captures critical information for later reference and review?

Strategic Project Management

Original Site: http://www.mypmhome.com/?p=141

Project management is an art, and project management is also a science. This is my understanding of project management.

It is a science, because it includes all aspects management knowledge. When it comes to project management, people naturally think of its eight major elements: scope, time, cost, quality, human resources, risk, procurement, communication. A successful project is closely related to all these factors.

However, in the actual participation of project, we can find the factor which associated with most of the activities is the project stakeholders; project stakeholders generally include the customer or user, the project team, the project company’s managers and other major stakeholders. In the project management, time, cost, quality, human resources, risk, and procurement are related to communication. How to set up a successful project teams? How to play full potential of team in the project? How relationships with customers are maturing? How to do customer satisfaction? All these are communication management, and the project manager must master the skills.

To carry out all elements of communication, to manage all related people, project manager should stand on stakeholders’ perspective, from their needs and interests to achieve their maximum value through the project. If out of these, it is difficult to make project success.

In the development of software, the communication style of requirements management affect the accuracy of the requirement baseline, the same in the project design and development process, the communication result between project members and project manager directly affect the success of the project. The key goal of communication in project is to maintain the progress of the project, identify potential problems, requests for proposals to improve project performance. If the communication is carried out improperly, the project will failed unexpected.

Communication in project management has its inevitable and irreplaceable important role. In the 1995, Standish Group study found that IT project success is related to three main factors: user participation, management support, requirement clear. All of these factors are dependent on having good communication skills.

Early in the project, the project manager in addition to the preparation of a good communication plan, but also to understand how to manage team, and how to meet the needs of customer, standing on the roles of stakeholders, so as to achieve a successful project targets.

Speaking of project management is an art, not only refer to the communication skills with stockholders, most of project managers can blindly memorizing the eight elements of project management, but how to control them flexibility, making these elements more suitable to the actual operation of the project, it requires the project manager having art management techniques in the operation. Management rules are surely died, but people are living. In every field of project management, these communication skills are generic and hold the other project management with the requirements of the relevant elements of the.

How to use the art of project management flexibility in practical work, ensure that the project greatly meet customer’s needs, guide the project towards the goal of success, this is the key thing every project manager should consider and carefully implement.

Original Site: http://www.mypmhome.com/?p=141

Project Management Blog – Connecting Developers, Building Worlds

After taking a couple of extra days off to celebrate the holiday, it’s nice to be back in the saddle. Yesterday, as I was going through my daily routine, I came across an excellent blog post by Bas de Baar, better known as the Project Shrink—How Social Media Solves Communication Problems. We both agree that face-to-face conversations trump email for communication effectiveness, in fact Baar suggests, "Words just form 7% of our daily communication, the rest is 38% tone of voice and 55% body language; elements we lack when dealing with virtual channels."

I’ve come to the conclusion that email is often problematic because of the above-mentioned limitations. The immediacy of the medium has made our attitudes toward it far to cavalier for my taste. Without much thought, we can dash of an email that could easily be misinterpreted. Have you ever been in the position of explaining or apologizing for the "tone" of one of your emails? OR even worse, is your team afraid to approach you because your emails are so terse and abrupt that you always come across as a jerk? Because I have been on the receiving end of those types of emails, I work very hard to avoid doing that myself, yet despite my best efforts I’m afraid that I sometimes come across that way.

The Project Shrink points out two very powerful elements that social media offers virtual communication that help solve these issues and really can’t be ignored:

1. Feedback: "The secret to effective communication is feedback," he says. "The ability to leave comments on blogs is an essential part of the medium. Social networks like Linkedin provide the opportunity to have entire online conversations in an answer-reply sequence: the discussion groups."
2. Filling in the Blanks: "Social media is about having a ‘conversation,’" he continues. "An exchange of information between persons…Social media puts the emphasis on the person in the conversation. It is not only about the message itself, but also about the personas of the people involved in the exchange."

Social media has proven to be very effective at facilitating feedback in a more natural way than email. It also provides a wonderful vehicle for adding "qualitative" information to the "quantitative" information we have come to rely on for project status. It makes collecting what I call the "real story" easier because traditional red, yellow, or green status indicators don’t always paint an accurate picture of what’s really going on within a project. "Social media supports multiple mechanisms to help us fill in the blanks," says Bas de Baar.

Neither I nor the Project Shrink are suggesting that blogs or Linkedin are the perfect solution to facilitate communication among project teams, but only cite them as examples of successful communication using social media. That being said, we also agree that although social media methods do offer additional ways to facilitate effective project communication, it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. It’s up to project leaders and project teams to incorporate the methods that make the most sense to their teams. The Project Shrink’s blog offers some suggestions (both project, professional and personal) for using social media. "Again, it’s not about the tool," he suggests. I couldn’t agree more.

If you are using social media tools in your projects, share with us how you are using them and what you are using. I’m sure there are many of us who would like to hear more.

Strategic Project Management

After taking a couple of extra days off to celebrate the holiday, it’s nice to be back in the saddle. Yesterday, as I was going through my daily routine, I came across an excellent blog post by Bas de Baar, better known as the Project Shrink—How Social Media Solves Communication Problems. We both agree that face-to-face conversations trump email for communication effectiveness, in fact Baar suggests, "Words just form 7% of our daily communication, the rest is 38% tone of voice and 55% body language; elements we lack when dealing with virtual channels."

I’ve come to the conclusion that email is often problematic because of the above-mentioned limitations. The immediacy of the medium has made our attitudes toward it far to cavalier for my taste. Without much thought, we can dash of an email that could easily be misinterpreted. Have you ever been in the position of explaining or apologizing for the "tone" of one of your emails? OR even worse, is your team afraid to approach you because your emails are so terse and abrupt that you always come across as a jerk? Because I have been on the receiving end of those types of emails, I work very hard to avoid doing that myself, yet despite my best efforts I’m afraid that I sometimes come across that way.

The Project Shrink points out two very powerful elements that social media offers virtual communication that help solve these issues and really can’t be ignored:

1. Feedback: "The secret to effective communication is feedback," he says. "The ability to leave comments on blogs is an essential part of the medium. Social networks like Linkedin provide the opportunity to have entire online conversations in an answer-reply sequence: the discussion groups."
2. Filling in the Blanks: "Social media is about having a ‘conversation,’" he continues. "An exchange of information between persons…Social media puts the emphasis on the person in the conversation. It is not only about the message itself, but also about the personas of the people involved in the exchange."

Social media has proven to be very effective at facilitating feedback in a more natural way than email. It also provides a wonderful vehicle for adding "qualitative" information to the "quantitative" information we have come to rely on for project status. It makes collecting what I call the "real story" easier because traditional red, yellow, or green status indicators don’t always paint an accurate picture of what’s really going on within a project. "Social media supports multiple mechanisms to help us fill in the blanks," says Bas de Baar.

Neither I nor the Project Shrink are suggesting that blogs or Linkedin are the perfect solution to facilitate communication among project teams, but only cite them as examples of successful communication using social media. That being said, we also agree that although social media methods do offer additional ways to facilitate effective project communication, it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. It’s up to project leaders and project teams to incorporate the methods that make the most sense to their teams. The Project Shrink’s blog offers some suggestions (both project, professional and personal) for using social media. "Again, it’s not about the tool," he suggests. I couldn’t agree more.

If you are using social media tools in your projects, share with us how you are using them and what you are using. I’m sure there are many of us who would like to hear more.

Strategic Project Management

The Importance of Communication in Project Management

“Since I didn’t hear otherwise, I ASSUMED all was going well” – The Importance of Communication in Project Management

Second on Rick Klemm’s list of things most commonly overheard on a failing software project, this remark is characteristic of Project Managers who are not in frequent and efficient communication with their staff.

Communication is key to successful Project Management.

If project staff do not know what their tasks are, or how to accomplish them, then the entire project will grind to a halt. If you do not know what the project staff are (not) doing then you will be unable to monitor project progress. And if you are uncertain of what the customer expects of you, then the project will not even get off the ground.

Maintaining open, regular and accurate channels of communication with all levels of project staff and stakeholders is vital to ensuring the smooth flow of instructions from customer to factory floor and sufficient warning of risks and changes to enable early assessment and preparation.

•    The Information that You Need to Give

As Project Manager, it is your job to keep a number of people well-informed. It is essential that your project staff know what is expected of them: what they have to do, when they have to do it, and what budget and time constraints and quality specification they are working towards.

It is also your job to keep the Project Board informed of project progress. The Project Board usually includes the Executive (person ultimately responsible for the project), and representatives from the User and the Supplier.

It is important that the Project Manager updates the Project Board regularly on the status of the project, so that any changes or risks can be assessed, project progress can be measured against the original Business Case and a project that is not fulfilling its purpose or matching the value of its investment can be called to a halt.

•    The Information that You Need to Receive

In order to keep the relevant people informed, you must have regular and complete access to all information about the project: customer needs, objectives, plan, constraints, changes/risks and progress.

PRINCE2TM, the government-standard Project Management methodology, suggests that a system of ‘management products’ (documents used to make management more efficient) is set up.

For example, a Project Quality Plan relies on information about quality expectations provided by the Customer. The Quality Log is a record of quality checks performed by project staff. Both documents are necessary for effective management of product quality.

The PRINCE2TM method also recommends that Project Managers establish regular dates for Checkpoint Reports (detailing the progress of individual teams and team members) and Highlight Reports (documents prepared by the Project Manager, for the Project Board, describing overall project progress).

With disciplined adherence to a system of regular and focused communication, you will avoid the misunderstandings and delays that so frequently lead to project failure and ensure that all your project staff and stakeholders are secure in their knowledge of what has to be done, and who is doing it.

Related project management video:

This is the speaking PRACTICE for VV 07 Project Management. Watch the video and see how many words you can remember. You can also visit www.BusinessEnglishPod.com to download the complete video.

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