In a project, how do you manage effective communication?

 Daily meets, mails & Phone are important tools to manage any project and must Schedule this project by Primavera or any other program.    

I see that effective communications must be built into the project plan. This way you don't leave room for chances.

Okay simple, don't leave anything to expectation. And always talk to stakeholders for important instructions.

Successful project management communication relies on being able to discuss the current issues and economic challenges facing the sponsoring organisation and its industry 

Communication is vital in project management. In fact, I’d say good communication skills are one of the most important qualities a project manager can possess. But is a project manager getting involved in the internal communication of the project team actually providing value?

As a quick thought experiment, let’s imagine a team of five members. In a self-organising team, it may be that each member has a discussion with every other member to let them know where they are up to, what they are working on, etc. This communication, in one direction (i.e. person A telling person B their situation) takes an amount of time I’ll call t.

Now, the communication cannot be one way – person B also needs to tell person A what they are up to. So they also take time t to pass that information on. So the total time for the update conversation is2t. But the total work time is4t – i.e.2t for each participant.

I have shown this situation in the5 person team in the diagram. In this situation, each person talks to every other person. There are10 conversations, each taking a time of2t. This means, with two people in each conversation, the total work time used is40t.

Now let’s look at the situation when we add a project manager. In this case, I have assumed each team member tells the project manager where they are up to. The project manager then evaluates the information, and feeds back to every team member. The two way conversation thus still exists, though the two ways may happen at different times. In this model, there are5 conversations, each of which take time2t, giving a total time of10t, or a total work time of20t.

In other words, adding a project manager reduces the time the team spends in sharing information by half – in this particular case.

Of course, there are other possibilities. It may be the self-organising team shares information through a meeting, rather than separate conversations. This would dramatically reduce the total time. In this model, person A tells all the other members of the team what they are doing at the same time. Then person B does so, and so on.

This reduces the total time taken to just5t, but the total work time is only reduced to25t – it only takes person A time t to update the other4, but each of the5 has to be there, a total of5t work time. This is repeated for the other4 people.

In a team with a manager the total work time would be higher – purely because the project manager has to sit in the meeting too. If, however, the project manager receives updates from the team members individually (for a total work time of10t) and then feeds back to the entire team (for a total work time of6t) then we have a total work time of16t – again less than in the self-organising team.

We can easily expand this up to teams with10 members. In this case, team members holding individual conversations gives us a total work time used in communication of180t, a team holding a meeting gives a total work time of100t, while a team using a manager and meetings takes a total work time of31t!

At this point it all looks cut and dried – self-organising teams, even if they use meetings, spend far more time in communication than a managed team.

Of course, that’s only true when you have been as grossly unfair with the figures as I have. (Using pseudo-scientific methods and information to draw unfounded conclusions is fun!)

The most obvious way I have been unfair is assuming the project manager can condense down everything all the team members need to know massively. In the model where the manager has a conversation with each team member, I have decided the information which the other team members took4t to pass to him can somehow be condensed down to only take t for him to pass on! This seems rather unlikely…

So no, I’m not saying these figures are going to be accurate. But they do illustrate some important ideas.

1. Time taken to communicate amongst a team rises dramatically with team size.
2. The most effective way to reduce this is to hold meetings, so team members don’t have to repeat themselves with each other member.
3. Project managers can aid communication if they act as a central collation point.
4. But the best improvement in communication comes if the project manager condenses or filters the information.

In other words, you need to be more than good at talking. A project manager needs to understand the project well enough to know who needs to know which pieces of information, and just as importantly, which pieces of information are of no use to other members. You need to act as a filter, to make sure you’re not wasting the time of your team members.

Communication isn’t about how much you say to everyone, it’s about saying the right things to the right people.