Project Management Communication Tools

Preface

 

This book is a guide for all project managers, team members, and customers or clients regardless of the project’s size, industry, or complexity. The book acts as a single source of project communication tools for immediate use on your projects. As a project manager, one of your top priorities is to ensure that you have a handle on all of your project’s communications. It’s critical that you control every “major” message flowing in and out of your project.

There is an old, but wise, saying, “A project that communicates poorly is going to perform poorly.” That’s such a true statement, and one that should guide you on your projects. This book maps various communication tools to PMI’s PMBOK® Guide knowledge areas and life-cycle process.

The mapping between the methodologies and the tools allows you and your team members to easily understand which tools to use when communicating during a particular area of the project. As you start to look at the mapping between the communication tools and the knowledge areas, there can be a great debate over where a tool will live.

Should the tool be in the planning or executing phase? Should a tool be assigned to integration or closing? Regardless of where a tool should or shouldn’t live, your job is to find the right tool for what you are trying to communicate. If you are stuck trying to communicate a budget issue, look in the cost section to find the budgeting tools.

We understand that there cannot be a perfect match on where a tool will live, but that’s really not the point of the mapping. The point is to get you thinking about your projects in a different way and to be able to quickly find a tool based on your project’s current knowledge area or life cycle. We mapped both the PMBOK® Guide’s knowledge areas and life-cycle processes for every communication tool.

When reviewing the tools in this book, you will see the terms “customer” or “stakeholder,” and it is important to understand who these individuals are. The project customer, or stakeholder, is the individual who has commissioned you to do the project. Some people use the term “client,” but regardless of the term used, this individual is the “customer.” The other assumption that we make is that you, the reader, are a project manager.

You will see a lot of “you” must do this, or “you” should do that, well, that’s because we are speaking to you, the project manager. You could be running a large IT project, a construction project, or a research project. It doesn’t matter the project type, what matters is you understand that we are trying to help you be more successful.

This book includes an appendix with a table called, “Project Management Communication Tools List” that provides you with an instant reference of the various communication tools located throughout the book. The spreadsheet contains tool name, chapter # for part II chapter # for part III, knowledge area, life cycle, and its’ purpose for use with social media tools.

You’ll likely find this spreadsheet priceless in managing your project’s communications! If you are not a project manager, and you are playing the role of a customer or a client of a project, having this knowledge and understanding of the mapping between communication tools and knowledge areas or life-cycle processes will be valuable to you as well.

This will give you great insight and allow you to have meaningful conversations with your project manager or team members about which tools are available to use on the project. You can request that the project manager use tools that you need for particular areas of the project that you previously didn’t know existed.

If you ever feel you are not getting good information on a particular area of the project from your team, you now have access to solutions and several tools at your fingertips that you can share with your project manager for use on the project. This information is valuable and will help you get the information you need from the project manager in a format you can use to make project decisions.

It is important that you are getting the information you need to make project decisions and guide the project to completion. Using the tools in this book, you can suggest to the project manager, or team members, the tools you would like them to use on your project. The project manager will have examples readily available that they can show you and that you can jointly agree to use on your project.

Without you having the knowledge of all the different kinds of communication tools available, you may not know what project information you are missing (budget spreadsheet, risk register…and so on) and, therefore, may not be getting all the data you need to make project decisions. This book will become valuable to you in ensuring your project manager or project team members are continually sending you the information you need in the format that you need.

To communicate more effectively, this book offers a series of communication tools to anyone involved in the project. There are times when project managers, or team members, are unfamiliar with how to communicate certain aspects of their project. That happens to even the most seasoned project managers.

However, there is a solution, and that is for the project manager to grab the mapping chart for communication tools to knowledge areas (or life-cycle processes) to help resolve that communication issue. The project manager can reference any one of the tools in this book to help communicate across any of those areas. Because there are many tools in this book, there is a high likelihood that one of the tools will be applicable for a particular projects scenario.

The communication tools in this book are applicable for across various projects and most industries. That is the great aspect about project communication management; it is not industry specific—a status report is a status report. You need one in IT, you need one in construction, and you need one in manufacturing. The content is different, but the tools are essentially the same.