During any project, knowing how to communicate, as well as when to use a project management service for communication, is critical. Communicating with all your stakeholders is the single most important factor for project management success, according to a report from the Project Management Institute. Poor communications are too often the cause of other problems that lead a project off course or sink it altogether.
What does clear, open, and effective communication mean in terms of project management, and how do you do it? Last week's Get Organized column looked at how to get started managing a project. The key takeaways were about defining the project (and making sure it is a project rather than just ongoing work) and its requirements, scope, deliverables, milestones, and players, including stakeholders. If you haven't already read it, I recommend doing so before tackling this article.
How Poor Communication Affects Project Management
The top three problems that prevent a project from being successful are changes in scope, poor estimation in the planning phase, and poorly defined goals and objectives, according to a survey by PricewaterhouseCooper. But Jason Westland, CEO of ProjectManager.com, sees all those as issues stemming from a different root: bad communication.
"If a project manager doesn't have the scope down or if players don't know the timeline, things fall apart, or what's delivered doesn't meet the requirements," Westland said when I spoke with him recently about project management best practices.
Westland, who also wrote The Project Management Life Cycle, added, "What typically happens is the project manager doesn't have a true handle on the scope of the project. The team doesn't really know what they're delivering. No one really knows what the end dates for the milestones or key deliverables are. And throughout the course of the project, no one keeps them informed of the overall vision, the reason why they're doing it. And things just slip."
Westland grew up in New Zealand. He shared with me an analogy between herding sheep on the terrain of his motherland and managing a project.
Imagine a young boy who has to move 300 sheep from one paddock to another using nothing more than a few dogs. "You're in constant communication with your dogs through a whistle," he said. "The dogs are moving constantly to split groups [of sheep] or merge groups." The job may seem unwieldy for one boy and a few hounds, but if there's never a break in communication, and the boy keeps reminding himself of his target, it can be done.
The Big Picture
During a project's kickoff meeting, all the players who will be working on the project must leave the meeting with a clear description of what the final project will comprise. In other words, everyone should have not just a vision, but written details, too.
Imagine a project that takes one year to complete. A few months into the project, it's entirely possible that the vision in someone's mind's eye has morphed a little since day one. The project manager needs to remind everyone of the description of the final project—and needs to do so often. This kind of vision communication can happen during a regularly scheduled meeting (more on that in a moment), or by bringing in the project's client from time to time to remind the team what they're working toward.
Additionally, everyone on the project team is responsible for communicating when a task or series of tasks veers away from the next deliverable or the project's final description. When a task arises that isn't within the scope, workers need to speak up, and project managers need to listen. Communication is a two-way street. Similarly, if a team believes it won't hit a deadline, they need to tell the project manager when they're in jeopardy, not after it's too late. A project manager who hears communication of this kind can make decisions accordingly. And, as you may have guessed, the project manager needs to inform the team of whatever changes are made and solicit feedback.
Fine Detail
In addition to returning to the vision often and keeping the scope in check, project managers have to know about every fine detail. "During the project, it's really important that the project manager is fully aware of every task and what the status of that task is," Westland said.
Projects can easily have thousands of tasks, which is a lot of information for any one project manager to remember. It's for that very reason that a project management service is so valuable. Two examples are Zoho ProjectsVisit Site at Zoho Projects and Teamwork ProjectsVisit Site at Teamwork, although there are dozens on the market for teams of various sizes and complexity.
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When teams use project management platforms, all tasks are recorded in the system and are visible to everyone who needs to see them (or sometimes they're visible to everyone, depending on the tool). Each task has an assignee and due date. There's also usually additional information that describes whether the task is currently not yet on anyone's plate, currently active, or completed. Some platforms monitor in even greater details the percent level of completion of each task. So a project manager can check in on a task at any time to see its status without having to walk over to someone's desk, tap that person on the shoulder, and ask. It completely changes the nature of communication.
Project management tools centralize information and give everyone access to it. In the end, documentation is just another form of communication.
Peter Clarkson, director at Maestro Development, which makes the project management platform Maestro Project Office, is a former project manager who has managed thousands of projects. "I did a lot of auditing of bad projects. I was known as a bail-out artist," he told me. "Invariably, [the project's problem] tied back to lack of methodology, and lack of knowing what went on in the project: not documenting the meetings, the issues, the actions."
When Clarkson describes his day as a project manager, the importance of communication and the project manager being connected to every bit of communication, becomes evident. "As a project manager, I always claimed I was lazy because I never assigned anything to myself ever," he said. "All I did was walk around and talk to people, or read reports, or check in the database on issues that were brewing and being recorded, but nobody was doing anything with. I'd read meeting minutes from various meetings that I didn't actually go to." He said he easily spent a third of his workday in whatever project management tool and database the teams were using.
Meetings
Most projects and project teams rely on meetings to some extent. As Westland explains, "Before online tools, project managers typically ran a weekly stand-up meeting in which everyone simply stated what tasks they were working on, which tasks they have completed, and the status of other deliverables or tasks." But with a project management platform in place, where all this information is recorded and made visible, is there still a point to having meetings?
Actually, yes. While communication is greatly improved by online tools, meetings are still beneficial. "It's not that you still don't have stand-ups; it's just that the purpose changes. Instead of a weekly task-based stand-up, it can become a biweekly meeting in which the project manager restates the vision and makes sure everyone knows where they need to go, or brings in the client to talk about the reason the project is being delivered. It becomes more of a strategy session than an execution session," Westland said.
Postmortems
Communication is key to the success of every project, not only in the planning phase and kickoff meeting, but also throughout the course of the project, and even after it has finished. Postmortem meetings give team members one final opportunity to communicate what went right and wrong on a project.
Team members should be honest and open with their feedback, but just as importantly, the project manager must listen to the feedback, record it, and refer to it the next time a similar project arises.
Project management platforms can also be a great source of reference material after a project ends. Most teams benefit from reviewing their project's reports and history to get a better sense of what happened when something went awry.
For more tips on how to get the most from PCMag's two Editors' Choice project management services, you can read 7 Ways to Simplify Project Management in Teamwork Projects and 5 Zoho Projects Features to Organize Your Business.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.