Last Updated: January17, 2022
Plan Communications Workflow
Perhaps the oldest human activity studied has been communication. Certainly, since the early origins of Western Civilization, communication has been viewed as one of the ancient arts. All communication experts, then and now, agree that good communication doesn’t just occur, rather effective communication needs to be planned, developed, and presented.
The process for identifying the communication network is first:
Identify Communication Network
Usually, there is a wide variety of stakeholders who have an interest in most projects.
All parties that have an interest or stake in the project. Stakeholders can be individuals, groups, organizations, customers, or clients.
First, divide the stakeholders into meaningful groups. The eventual goal is to provide meaningful communication to each of these groups. Groups could be:
Team members
Management
Customer
Client
Users
Resource managers
Agencies
Executives
Investors
Owners
Suppliers
Rank Order Stakeholder Groups
Communication management is just like risk management in that we don’t have unlimited time and money to address all communication needs or risk issues.
This is a simple activity but it should help you focus on your most important communication.
Plan Communications
One way to plan formal project communication is to network or plan all communications. The Communication Network v6.docx can be downloaded to help develop that network.
Establish Reporting Standards
There are four types of reporting functionalities in Microsoft Project.
Create and Print Views
Create and Print Standard Reports
Create and Print Visual Reports
Copy Selection, Copy Picture, Copy Timeline, and Copy Report
Project Example
A colleague with a background in rolling out change in organizations would assemble all the related managers on a project and ask them what they wanted to see each week related to the people they had working on his project. He believed that on most projects in weak matrix organizations, managers influenced the performance of the people working on his project more than he ever could. Eventually, he would assemble the reports, get the managers together again, and ask, “If I can give you this information each week you have asked for, can you do something for me?” “I am going to ask your people to status their work on activities and enter estimates of work remaining by the end of business each Friday; I will give you a list of who does and who doesn’t update their work the following Monday morning, can you encourage your people to do this simple update each week?”
In this example, this colleague focused on communicating effectively with management to encourage them to ensure that their direct reports assigned to his project would update their work each week. Asking team members to status or update their assigned work each week is one of the primary techniques to keep people focused and committed to getting things done as scheduled. Anyone who has ever asked a group of people who do not directly report to you to update their work each week knows from experience what a challenge this is. Once he established this communication, he would shift to figure out what specific communication project stakeholders needed. Eventually, he would approach the team members and ask them what they wanted to see each week.