Chapter 10:

Project Communications
Management
 Learning Objectives
 Understand the importance of good communications in projects
 Discuss the process of identifying stakeholders, create a
stakeholder register and stakeholder management strategy
 Explain the elements of project communications planning and
how to create a communications management plan
 Describe various methods for distributing project information,
importance of addressing individual communication needs, and
concept of communications channels in a project
 Understand how performance reporting helps stakeholders stay
informed about project resources
 Methods for improving project communications: managing
conflicts, running effective meetings etc

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 Why good communication?
• Many experts agree that the greatest threat to the
success of IT projects is a failure to communicate.
• Many problems in other knowledge areas, such as
unclear scope or unrealistic schedules arise due to
lack of communications.
• It is crucial for project managers and their teams to
make good communications a priority , especially
with key stakeholders, like top management.

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 Why good communication?
• The information technology field is constantly changing, and
these changes bring with them a great deal of technical
jargon.
• When computer professionals have to communicate with non
computer professionals, like most business professionals and
senior managers, technical jargons can confuse matters.
• In addition, most educational systems for IT graduates
promote strong technical skills over strong communication
and social skills

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 Project Communications
Management Processes
1. Identifying stakeholders
2. Planning communications
3. Distributing information
4. Managing stakeholder expectations
5. Reporting performance

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Figure 10-1. Project Communications
Management Summary

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 1-Identifying Stakeholders
• Identifying everyone involved in or affected by
the project and determining the best ways to
manage relationships with them

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 1-Identifying Stakeholders
• Stakeholders are the people involved in or
affected by the project activities
– sponsor
– project team
– support staff
– customers
– users, suppliers,
– and opponents to the project,

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 1-Identifying Stakeholders
• Ultimate goal of PM is to meet or exceed
stakeholder needs and expectations:
– So first identify project stakeholders
– It is easy to find some stakeholders like sponsor,
PM, project team
– But difficult to find some like opponents and some
competitors
So use all formal and informal communication
networks to identify all stakeholders

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 1-Identifying Stakeholders
• Two key outputs of this process include:
– Stakeholder register: a public document that includes
details related to the identified project stakeholders (see
Table 3-4 for an example)
– Stakeholder management strategy: an approach to help
increase the support of stakeholders throughout the
project; often includes sensitive information

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Table 10-1. Stakeholder Management Strategy

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 2-Planning communications
• Determining the information and communications
needs of the stakeholders
• Because communication is so important on projects,
every project should include a communications
management plan- a document That guides Project
communications

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 Communications Management
Plan Contents

 Stakeholder communications requirements

 Information to be communicated, including

format, content, and level of detail

 The people who will receive the information

and who will produce it

 Suggested methods or technologies for

conveying the information
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 Communications Management
Plan Contents (continued)

 Frequency of communication

 procedures for resolving issues

 A glossary of common terminology

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Table 10-2. Sample Stakeholder Analysis for
Project Communications

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 3-Distributing Information
 Getting the right information to the right
people at the right time and in a useful format
is just as important as developing the
information in the first place
 Important considerations for information
distribution include:
 Using technology to enhance information distribution
 Formal and informal methods for distributing information

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 Use of Technology
• Technology can facilitate the process of distributing
information , when used properly. Most people and
businesses rely on:
– e-mail
– instant messaging
– Websites
– Telephones and other technologies to communicate
• By Using internal PM information you can organize project
documents, meeting minutes, customer requests and so on.
And make them available in an electronic format.
• You can store this information in local software or make it
available on an intranet, an extranet or the internet, if the
information is not sensitive.
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 Formal and Informal Methods
• It is very common that team members submit status report to
project managers and other stakeholders and assume that
everyone who needs to know that information will read the
reports.
• This technique hold good for introvert people but 75% of
population are extrovert.
• These people instead of focusing on getting information by
reading technical documents want to know the people
working on their projects and develop a trusting relationship
with them.
• They use informal discussions about the project to develop
these relationships.
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Selecting appropriate
communication media

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 Example
• If you were trying to assess commitment of
project stakeholders.
• A meeting would be the most appropriate
medium to use. (A face-to face meeting would
he preferable, but a Web conference. where
participants can see and hear each other,
would also Qualify as a meeting.)
• A phone call would be adequate, but the other
media would not be appropriate.
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Importance of Face-to-Face Communication

 Research says that in a face-to-face interaction:

 58 percent of communication is through body
language
 35 percent of communication is through how the
words are said
 7 percent of communication is through the content
or words that are spoken
 Pay attention to more than just the actual
words someone is saying
 A person’s tone of voice and body language say
a lot about how he or she really feels • 21
 Number of communication
channels
• Information distribution is also dependent on
number of people involved in project.
• As number of people increases the complexity
of communication increases because there are
more Communication channels.

No of communication channels=n(n-1)/2

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Number of communication
channels

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 4-Managing Stakeholders
• Recall that project success is often measured
in different ways.
– Many studies define project success as meeting
project scope, time, and cost goals.
– Many practitioners, however, define project
success as satisfying the customer/sponsor,
knowing that it s rare to meet scope, time, and
cost goals without modifying at least one goal.

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 Managing Stakeholders
• Project sponsors can usually rank scope, time,
and cost goals in order of importance
• They should provide guidelines on how to
balance the triple constraint.
• This ranking is shown in an expectations
management matrix, which can help clarify
expectations

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 Expectations Management Matrix
• The expectations management matrix
includes:
– list of measures of success
– Their Priorities
– expectations
– guidelines related to each measure.
– You could add additional measures of success,
such as meeting quality expectations, achieving a
certain customer satisfaction
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Expectations Management Matrix

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 5-Reporting Performance
Performance reporting keeps stakeholders
informed about how resources are being used
to achieve project objectives:
• Two key outputs of performance reporting are
– performance reports
– forecasts.
• Performance reports are normally provided as
– status reports
– progress reports.
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 Status report
• Status reports describe where the project
stands at a specific point in time in terms of
meeting scope, time, and cost goals.
• For example
– How much money has been spent to date?
– How long did it take to do certain tasks?
– Is work being accomplished as planned?

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 Progress report
• Progress reports describe what the project
team has accomplished during a certain
period of time
– Many projects have each team member prepare a
monthly or sometimes weekly progress report.
– Team leaders often create consolidated progress
reports based on the information received from
team members.

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 Forecast
• Forecasts predict future project status and
progress based on past information and trends
– How long will it take to finish the project based on
how things are going?
– How much more money will be needed to
complete the project?

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 Running Effective Meetings
• Determine if a meeting can be avoided
• Define the purpose and intended outcome of the meeting
• Determine who should attend the meeting
• Provide an agenda to participants before the meeting

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 Determine if a meeting can be
avoided
• Do not have a meeting if there is a better way
of achieving the objective at hand.
– For example, a project manager might know that he need
approval from a top manager to hire another person for
the project team.
– It could take a week or longer to schedule even a ten-
minute meeting on the top managers calendar.
– Instead, an e-mail or phone call describing the situation
and justifying the request is a faster, more effective
approach than having a meeting.

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 Define the purpose and intended
outcome of the meeting
• Be specific about what should happen as a
result of the meeting.
– Is the purpose to brainstorm ideas
– provide status information
– or solve a problem?
• Make the purpose of a meeting very clear to all
meeting planners and participants otherwise
everyone will start focusing on their own agendas
and very little will be accomplished
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 Determine who should attend the
meeting.
• Should only the project team leaders attend a
meeting?
• should the entire project team be involved?
• Many meetings are most effective with the
minimum number of participants possible,
especially if decisions must be made.

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 Provide an agenda to participants
before the meeting.
• Meetings are most effective when the
participants come prepared.
• Did they read reports before the meeting?
• Did they collect necessary information?
• Some professionals refuse to attend meetings
if they do not have an agenda ahead of time.

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Using E-Mail, Instant Messaging, and Collaborative Tools
Effectively
• Make sure that e-mail, instant messaging, or collaborative
tools are an appropriate medium for what you want to
communicate

• Be sure to send information to the right people

• Use meaningful subject lines, limit the content of e-mails to

one main subject, and be as clear and concise as possible

• Be sure to authorize the right people to share and edit your

collaborative documents

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Table 10-6. Final Project
Documentation Items

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 Lessons-Learned Reports
• The project manager and project team members should each
prepare a lessons-learned report
– A reflective statement that documents important things an
individual learned from working on the project
• The project manager often combines information from all of
the lessons-learned reports into a project summary report

• See template and sample in Chapter 3

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 Project Archives
• It is also important to organize and prepare
project archives
• Project archives are a complete set of
organized project records that provide an
accurate history of the project
• These archives can provide valuable
information for future projects as well

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 Chapter Summary
• The goal of project communications management is to ensure timely and
appropriate generation, collection, dissemination, storage, and disposition
of project information
• Main processes include:
– Identify stakeholders
– Plan communications
– Distribute information
– Manage stakeholder expectations
– Report performance

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