Project managers spend 80% of the time in communicating with the team members, project sponsors, customers and the senior management. A good project manager inspires people, shares the project vision with the group and creates a very motivating environment. But the challenge is how do you effectively communicate your team and convey clearly your plans & ideas and so that everybody understands them.
Pictures and numbers may be good for presentation to the management but they don’t give effective ways to communicate with the team. There are many software available in the market but most of the software are too complex to use and most of the features you never require or you hardly you use.
The solution should be simple so that you can not only effectively communicate with the project sponsors,customers and the senior management and at the same time have the team buy-in.
Followings are some effective guidelines to communicate within a project. Create the followings list and prepare a document; 1.List of the people whom you need to communicate? 2.What you are going to communicate and and how the team members communicate with each other and also how often? 3.What is your and your team members’ preferred media you are going to employ in the communication? 4.When and where the communication will occur? 5.The purpose of the communication and whether it is formal or informal
Prepare a solid communication management plan from the above list. Create a list all important factors upon which your communications management plan depends. For example, how the team members communicate formally and informally, the communication among team members located in several time zones, what communication media they prefer to use and how they deliver reports. A dependency may be an input or output or time-related relationship.
You need to mange dependencies and confirm that the deliverables are well-defined, within the project scope. Include a statement of work in your communication management plan. All the parties involved should understand the schedule and cost for the project.
The average Fortune 100 worker already is sending and receiving approximately 178 messages and documents each day, according to a recent study. People at all kinds of work places are overwhelmed by 100s of emails, repots, charts and graphs. Effective communication nowadays is a tough challenge. Reducing dependency on emails and document sharing and give your employees simple tools to communicate with all parties involved with fewer emails and documents. Simplicity should be only solution to ease the burden of information overflow from their shoulders.
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