Chapter 11 Review

Clear Communication among Project Stakeholders


Project communication ranks high among the factors that make a project successful. Constant, effective communication among everyone involved in the project is facilitated using the project management techniques described in the text, all of which are essentially communication tools. This chapter describes the communication responsibilities of the PM, summarized as follows:

• Communicating with the project team comprises four areas:
• Responsibilities - each team member need to know what part of the project s/he has responsibility
• Make task assignments clear by observing these basic rules:
• Explain the deliverables
• Be clear about the level of effort expected and the due dates
• If you know of any obstacles or special information they'll need, make sure they know it too. Set them up for success.
• Hand out work assignments personally, allowing plenty of time for questions and discussion
• Coordination - enables the team to work together effectively
• Start the project with a bang, have a kickoff meeting. The kickoff meeting brings all the stakeholders together to look each other in the eye and commit to reaching goals. One format would be:
• Sponsor leads the meeting and explains the project purpose and connection to the overall business
• Customers are introduced and they offer an explanation of the project's importance to their business
• PM is introduced and is enthusiastically endorsed by the sponsor
• Project team members are introduced. (Vendors and contractors also need to be introduced.) On big projects there are usually too many team members to introduce, so have kickoff meetings for teams within the project too.
• Project memorabilia are distributed. They help create a sense of unity and team spirit - don't wait until the project conclusion.
• Celebrate. Everyone needs to get to know each other and communicate their enthusiasm for the project.
• Enlisting Cooperation (Marlene Kissler)
• When working with people outside your group, department or company, you must overcome a tendency to minimize contact. These are the people who need interpersonal contact the most. Some tips include:
• Make personal contact. Establish rapport face-to-face.
• Start with a warm-up visit, a brief introductory meeting at a mutually convenient time. Send a friendly memo with a succinct overview of your project prior to the meeting and allow them ample time to review it and bring their questions.
• Ask for their help. Ask if they can meet the project schedule, giving them an opportunity to say no. Make sure they have realistic workload support from their manager.
• Personally introduce them to their contacts and technical resources in your company or department. Sit in on high-level meetings if necessary. Make sure your group is accessible and helpful.
• Provide an in-depth explanation in person including documentation they can refer to later. Don't force them to ask for anything.
• Invite them to all meetings and treat them like full team members.
• Include them in the information loop and make sure they are on all relevant distribution lists.
• Do milestone check-ins. Personally review the deliverables and catch miscommunications up front. Be explicit in your feedback about what has been done right and what needs improvement.
• Include them in all acknowledgement meetings and accomplishment write ups. Make acknowledgments appropriate to their level of contribution.
• Write them personal thank you notes.
• Write a memo to their supervisor specifically describing their contributions. Be fair, honest and timely with your report.
• If you don't employ these soft management skills, all the hard skills in the world won't get the project completed.
• Every component and every person on your project is important, and this includes interfaces with projects and people outside your project.
• A good project manager wants to be known as a person with whom people want to work.
• Set communication expectations
• Managing expectations applies equally to project communication
• Put the communication structure in place by setting up the structure for meetings and status reports, establishing the location of issue logs, and publishing change management procedures
• Configuration management
• Identify items/products
• Establish the control structure
• Assign configuration management responsibility
• Status - team members must be kept up to speed on the status of the project
• Schedule individual status meetings with every member of the team on a regular basis.
• You can't make them more productive if you don't know what they're working on and what problems they are struggling with.
• Put the meetings on the calendar
• Regular status meetings give the PM the opportunity to:
• Increase team cohesion
• Keep the internal team informed about project developments from sources external to the team
• Identify potential problems and share solutions
• Ensure that the team understands the progress of the project and works together to determine any changes to the project plan
• Make sure the entire team shares the responsibility of meeting all the project objectives
• Guidelines for running the project status meeting are as follow:
• Be prepared. Everyone attending the meeting needs to have an open task report (OTR) before the meeting begins. An OTR is a subset of the project plan listing any tasks that should have been completed but weren't, plus the tasks scheduled for the next two reporting periods.
• Include part-time team members who have been working on project tasks or will be working on them in the next two weeks.
• Use the meeting to disseminate decisions make by management or customers, and pass on any positive feedback from these stakeholders.
• Using the OTR get the status of every task that should have been started or completed since the last status meeting.
• Leverage whole team presence by considering action on any problems. If special action needs to be taken, write it down and add a task to the project plan or an action to the issues log. 
• Every action should have a due date and person responsible for its completion.
• Don't try to solve problems that are too big for the meeting or that don't include everyone present
• Review readiness for future tasks on the OTR
• Review project logs including issue logs and the risk log
• Face-to-face status meetings are best, but for a geographically dispersed team this is not possible. In that case, more formality is required to ensure all the issues are raised and everyone is heard. 
• OTR provides this structure.
• Authorization - team members need to know about the decisions made by customers, sponsors and management in order to keep all project decisions synchronized
• The best way to communicate difficulties to customers and managers is to simply present them with the facts.
• Change management process has two parts
• the steps leading up to the initial approval of the product
• the process for controlling changes to that product
• Preset change thresholds automatically escalate the change management responsibility to an appropriate level. These thresholds include:
• Lowest threshold: changes the project team can approve; no impact to cost, schedule or the way the customer will use the product
• Middle threshold: changes that will affect cost, schedule or functionality; require more formal approval and are the domain of the change board up to predefined limits
• High threshold: changes that affect cost, schedule or functionality beyond the limits of change board approval; requires higher-level executives from customer and project organizations to be involved
• Who makes up the change board?
• Representatives from the project team
• The customer's representative
• Representatives from groups with related products
• Representatives from functional management
• The formal change management process guards against the anarchy of sudden change decisions and helps the PM manage expectations and preserve reputation
• Change management planning occurs during the project definition stage.
• Select the members of the change board and decide how often meetings will be held
• There are eight components to every change management process:
• Identification of deliverables
• Creation of the intermediate deliverables
• Stakeholder evaluation/modification
• Formal acceptance
• The recording of change requests
• Evaluation of requests and recommendations
• Ongoing stakeholder evaluation/modificaiton
• Formal acceptance
• The purpose of change management is to keep the overall cost-schedule-quality equilibrium realistic and desirable
• Closeout reporting

• This is most neglected project management activity, but it can bring a very high return to the project management organization.
• The deliverables from the project closeout serve two purposes:
• finalize the project in the eyes of the stakeholders
• learning opportunity
• Produce a lessons learned report
• The PM must plan for customer acceptance form the beginning and must be clear what from it will take and the work required to achieve it.