Chapter 10. Communications management: Getting the word out
Communications management is about keeping everybody in the loop. Have you ever tried talking to someone in a really loud, crowded room? That’s what running a project is like if you don’t get a handle on communications. Luckily, there’s Communications Management, which is the knowledge area that gets everyone talking about the work that’s being done, so that they all stay on the same page. That way, everyone has the information they need to resolve any issues and keep the project moving forward.
Party at the Head First Lounge!
Jeff and Charles want to launch their new retro 1970s-style Head First Lounge, and they’re planning a party for the grand opening. They’re thinking of all of the things they need to arrange: the DJ, the hors d’oeuvres, the drinks, hula dancing. They need to start contacting caterers, DJs, and suppliers to make sure it all goes off without a hitch.
But something’s not right
When Jeff called the caterer and the DJ to request everything he wanted for the party, his old staticky phone made it hard for everybody to understand what he was asking. Sometimes their taste for retro furniture can make things a little difficult.
Anatomy of communication
When you communicate with your team, you need to encode your message into a phone call, a document, an IM chat, or sometimes even a different language for them to understand. Your team then decodes that message so they can get its content. If something happens to your message along the way (static on the phone line, your printer inserts garbage characters, your internet connection is spotty, or your translation isn’t very good), then your team might not get the intended message. The kind of interference that can alter your message is called noise.
Note
When you’re talking about messages, encoding, decoding, and noise, you’re talking about a communications model.
Get a handle on communication
Any kind of communication can have interference. The wrong person can get the message; noise can garble the transmission; you can make mistakes decoding or encoding the message. It turns out that 90% of a project manager’s job is communication, which is why there’s a whole knowledge area devoted to it. The Communications Management processes are here to help you avoid these common kinds of errors, by planning and carefully tracking the stakeholder communications on your project. Just like every other knowledge group we’ve covered so far, it all starts with a plan.
90% of a project manager’s job is communication.
It’s not enough to plan and manage the communications on your project. You need to make sure that everybody who has a stake in your project is getting accurate reports of how it’s going so they can make good decisions—that’s what the Monitor Communications process is all about. You use it to monitor the data your project is producing, and control how it is presented to your stakeholders.
Communications Management makes sure everybody gets the right message at the right time.
Tell everyone what’s going on
Once you have the Communications Management plan completed, it’s time to make sure that everybody is getting the information that they need to help your project succeed. The Manage Communications process is all about making sure that the right information makes it to the right people.
Communication methods There are a lot of different ways to get a message across. For the test you will need to know four different kinds of communication, and when to use them.
Get the message?
Communication is about more than just what you write and say. Your facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, and the context you are in have a lot to do with whether or not people will understand you. Effective communication takes the way you act and sound into account. Most of the communication on your project takes place during the Manage Communication process, so you need to know how to communicate effectively. Here are the important aspects to effective communication:
Nonverbal communication means your gestures, facial expressions, and physical appearance while you are communicating your message. Imagine what Jeff and Charles would think of the caterer if he negotiated the contract for their party while wearing a chicken suit. They probably wouldn’t take him very seriously. You don’t always think about it, but the way you behave can say more than your words when you are trying to get your message across.
Note
When you’re communicating with other people, you actually do more nonverbal communication than verbal!
Paralingual communication is the tone and pitch of your voice when you’re talking to people. If you sound anxious or upset, that will have an impact on the way people take the news you are giving. You use paralingual communication all the time—it’s a really important part of how you communicate. When your tone of voice makes it clear you’re really excited about something, or if you’re speaking sarcastically, that’s paralingual communication in action.
Note
If someone has dread in his voice when he tells you about a promotion, you get a much different impression than if he’d emailed you about it.
Feedback is when you respond to communication. The best way to be sure people know you are listening to them is to give lots of feedback. Some ways of giving feedback are summarizing their main points back to them, letting them know that you agree with them, or asking questions for clarification When you give a lot of feedback to someone who is speaking, that’s called active listening.
Note
Like effective communication, effective listening is about taking everything the speaker says and does into consideration and asking questions when you don’t understand.
Note
That’s why active listening is an important part of communication.
You do most of the project communication when you’re performing the Manage Communications process.
More Manage Communications tools
The tools in this process area are all about getting information from your team and making sure that the information makes it to the people who need it. You’ll start your project with a kickoff meeting to get everyone on the same page, and follow your Communications Management plan as your project progresses. As you learn more about your project, you write down decisions you make and everything you learn on the project as lessons learned.
Communication methods are the specific methods you use to distribute information to your team…and you’ve already learned about them!
Project management information systems are how you get the information your team needs to do the job. You might have an inbox where everyone puts their status information. If it’s printed out on paper, you’re doing hardcopy document distribution. You could also use electronic communication. For example, you might use email, or you could have a software application that gathers information about your project and saves it to a database so that you can make your reports. Or your company might have electronic tools for project management, like a timesheet system for tracking hours spent on a project or a budgeting system for tracking expenditures. All of those are information gathering and retrieval systems, because you’ll use the data they produce to make decisions about your project.
Project reporting is all about gathering information on how your team is progressing through the project. You might create status reports that show how close you are to your baseline schedule and highlight issues that your team has run into along the way. You’ll always want to keep everybody informed on how your project is tracking risks, any changes that might come up that weren’t planned for, and forecasts of what’s coming up next for the team.
Communication technology is a tool that you use to get the message out. If you need to get a message to someone urgently, it might be hard to wait for a face-to-face meeting. You might choose to use email, phone, or a ticketing system to communicate. There are a lot of factors other than urgency that influence your decision to use a particular technology when communicating, including availability, how easy the technology is to use, whether or not the team can meet to face-to-face because of where they work, and how confidential the information you’re communicating is.
Communication skills are all about how well people communicate with each other. They’re skills that we can—and should!—work on throughout our careers.
Interpersonal and team skills are also important. They help you work with a team, and with others in your organization.
Meetings are among the most common communication tools found on projects.
Project communications
Throughout your project, you’re creating status reports, presentations, and many other communications to keep your project stakeholders informed. It makes sense that all of these would be outputs of the Manage Communications process.
Project Management plan updates
As your project progresses, you’ll make changes to the Project Management plan as new information is available. All of those project plan updates help to communicate what’s going on in your project.
Project document updates
We’ve seen in other processes that keeping the project documentation updated is a big part of keeping everyone on the same page. Those project document updates are likewise a big part of how your project is communicated to all of the project stakeholders.
Organizational process asset updates
You’ve used lessons learned from all of the other projects your company has done as you’ve planned out your work. Here’s where you get a chance to give your project’s experience back to the company and to help future project managers learn from what’s happened on your project.
One of your most important outputs
Lessons learned are all of the corrective and preventive actions that you have had to take on your project, and anything you have learned along the way. And one of the most valuable things you’ll do for future project managers is write them down and add them to your company’s organizational process asset library. That way, other people can learn from your experience.
there are no Dumb Questions
Q: What do I do with lessons learned after I write them?
A: The great thing about lessons learned is that you get to help other project managers with them. You add them to your company’s organizational process asset library, and other project managers then use them for planning their projects.
Since Jeff and Charles learned that they shouldn’t use their retro phones for planning parties, no one should ever have to deal with that problem when planning a party for Jeff and Charles again. They wrote down the lesson they learned and filed it away for future planning efforts.
Q: I still don’t get the different types of communication.
A: When you think about it, they are pretty easy to remember. You have formal and informal communication, and verbal and written communication types. The four different ways you can mix those up are all of the communication types. Think of informal verbal as phone calls between different team members. Formal verbal is giving a presentation. Informal written is sending out notes, emails, or memos. Formal written is when you have to write specifications or other formal project documentation.
For the test, you need to be able to identify which is which. If you just think of these examples, it should be a snap for you.
Q: Now, who’s decoding, who’s encoding, and where does feedback come from?
A: Think of encoding as making your message ready for other people to hear or read. If you write a book, you are encoding your message into words on pages. The person who buys the book needs to read it to decode it. The same is true for a presentation. When you present, you encode your thoughts into presentation images and text. The people who are listening to your presentation need to read the text, hear your voice, and see the visuals to decode it.
Feedback is all about the person who decodes the message letting the person who encoded it know that she received it. In the case of a book, this could be a reader sending a question or a note to the author or writing a review of it on a website. In a presentation, it could be as simple as nodding your head that you understand what’s being said.
Q: Do I have to know everything that will be communicated to build a plan?
A: No. As you learn more about the project, you can always update the plan to include new information as you learn it. Pretty much all of the planning processes allow for progressive elaboration. You plan as much as you can up front, and then put all changes through change control from then on. So, if you find something new, put in a change request and update the plan when it’s approved.
There are only four communication types; formal written, informal written, formal verbal, and informal verbal. For the test, you need to be able to tell which is which.
Let everyone know how the project’s going
You spend a lot of time collecting valuable information about how your projects are doing. So what do you do with it? You communicate it. And that’s what the Monitor Communications process is for: taking the information you gathered about how work is being done and distributing it to the stakeholders who need to make decisions about the project.
Note
Remember, the team members are all stakeholders, too—and this information is especially important to them.!
It all starts with work performance data
You create one of the most important outputs of your entire project when the team is doing the project work in Direct and Manage Project Work. Work performance data tells you the status of each deliverable in the project, what the team’s accomplished, and all of the information you need to know in order to figure out how your project’s going. But you’re not the only one who needs this—your team members and stakeholders need to know what’s going on, so they can adjust their work and correct problems early on.
Take a close look at the work being done
Work performance data isn’t the only information you need to figure out how the project is going. There are a whole lot of outputs from the Executing processes that you need to look at if you really want to get a clear picture of your project.
Monitor Communications takes the outputs from the Executing process in Manage Communications and turns them into work performance information.
Now you can get the word out
Now that you’ve gathered up all the information about how the project’s being done, it’s time to get it out to the people who need it. The outputs from Monitor Communications shouldn’t be particularly surprising… you’re just packaging up the information you collected and turning it all into stuff that’s easy to distribute to all the stakeholders. You’ve got three outputs from the process:
Work performance information is the most important output of the process—which shouldn’t be a surprise, since the process is called Monitor Communications. Your performance reports tell everyone exactly how the project is doing, and how far off it is from its time, cost, and scope baselines. These include forecasts, which are what you turn your EAC and ETC numbers into. That way, everyone has a good idea of when the project is going to finish.
Change requests happen when you do Monitor Communications. What do you do if you find out that your forecasts have your project coming in too late or over budget? You put the change request in as soon as possible. And if you need the project to change course, you’ll need to recommend corrective actions to the team.
Project Management plan updates need to be done to make sure your plan reflects your project’s current status.
Project documents updates could mean updates to performance reports, issue logs, or forecasts.
People aren’t talking!
There’s so much information floating around on any project, and if you’re not careful it won’t get to the people who need it. That’s why so much of your job is communication—if you don’t stay on top of all of it, your project can run into some serious trouble!
Count the channels of communication
How many people need to talk to one another? Well, Jeff and Charles need to talk. But what about the DJ and the band? They wanted to set up their equipment in the same place—it looks like they need to talk, too. And the bartender needs to coordinate with the caterer. Wow, this is starting to get complicated. A good project manager needs to get a handle on all this communication, because it’s really easy to lose track of it. That’s why you need to know how to count the channels of communication on any project.
Counting communication lines the easy way
Note
Sometimes you’ll see communications channels referred to as “lines.” You might see it either way on the exam, so we’ll use both terms here to get you used to them.
It would be really easy to get overwhelmed if you tried to count all the lines of communication by hand. Luckily, there’s a really easy way to do it by using a simple formula. Take the total number of people on the project—including the project manager—and call that number n. Then all you need to do is plug that number into this simple formula:
So, how many more lines of communication were added when three more people joined the three-person project above? You know there were three lines to start with. So now just figure out how many lines there are for six people:
When you added three more people to the three-person project—which had three lines of communication—the new team has 15 lines. So you added 12 channels of communication.
there are no Dumb Questions
Q: Some of those communication skills seem like the same thing. What’s the difference between active and effective listening?
A: Some of the communications ideas do have names that are a little confusing. But don’t worry, they’re really easy concepts for you to understand.
Active listening just means when you’re listening to something, you keep alert and take specific actions that help make sure you understand. It includes both effective listening and feedback. Effective listening is a way that you do active listening—it means paying attention to both verbal and nonverbal communication. Feedback means doing things like repeating back the words that you were told in order to make sure you understood them, and giving your own nonverbal cues to show the speaker that you got the message.
Q: OK, so what about nonverbal and paralingual communication? Aren’t those the same thing?
A: They are very similar, but they’re not exactly the same. Nonverbal communication is any kind of communication that doesn’t use words. That includes things like changing your body language, making eye contact, and using gestures. Paralingual communication is a kind of nonverbal communication—it’s changing your tone of voice or intonation, finding ways to communicate things above and beyond just the words that you’re saying. For example, the same words mean very different things if you say them sarcastically versus in a normal tone of voice.
Q: Why is all that stuff about different kinds of communication important?
A: It’s important because 90% of project management is communication, so if you want to be the best project manager that you can be, you need to constantly work to improve your communication skills!
Q: Should I always have a kickoff meeting?
A: Yes, absolutely! You should always have a kickoff meeting for every project. Not only that, but if you’re running the kind of project with several phases, and you go through all of the process groups for each phase, then you should have a separate kickoff meeting for each new phase. Kickoff meetings also help you define who’s responsible for various communications. Kickoff meetings are really important, because they give the team a chance to meet face-to-face, and give you the opportunity to make sure that everyone really understands all of the ways they can communicate with one another. That’s a great way to head off a lot of potential project problems!
Q: Why do I need to be able to calculate the number of lines of communication?
A: It may seem like the lines of communication formula is something arbitrary that you just need to memorize for the exam, but it’s actually pretty useful.
Let’s say that you have a project with a whole lot of people on it. You set up a good communication system in your Communication Management plan, but you want to make sure that you really included every line in it, because if you missed one then you could run into communications problems down the line. So what do you do? Well, one thing you can do to check your work is to calculate the total number of lines of communication in your project, and then make sure that every one of those lines is represented somewhere in your communications plan. It’s a little more work up front, but it could really save you a lot of effort down the line!
Q: I spent all that time working on performance reports. What do I do with them once I’m done with them?
A: The same thing you do with any information that you generate on your project. You add them to your organizational process assets!
Think back to how you came up with your estimates in Time Management and Cost Management. You spent a lot of time doing analogous estimation, right? That’s where you use performance from past projects to come up with a rough, top-down estimate for your new project. Well, where do you think the performance information from those past projects came from? You got them from your organizational process assets. And how did they end up there? Project managers from those past projects took their performance reports and added them. So you should add your performance reports, too. That way, project managers on future projects can use your project when they need to look up historical data.
You should add all of your performance reports to the organizational process assets so that project managers on future projects can use them as historical information.
It’s party time!
The Head First Lounge party is a big hit! Everything came together beautifully, and Jeff and Charles are the new downtown sensation!
Exam Questions
Keith, the project manager of a large publishing project, sends an invoice to his client. Which communication type is he using?
Formal verbal
Formal written
Informal written
Informal verbal
Which of the following is NOT an input to the Plan Communications Management process?
Enterprise environmental factors
Organizational process assets
Information gathering techniques
Project management plan
You take over for a project manager who has left the company and realize that the team is talking directly to the customer and having status meetings only when there are problems. The programming team has one idea about the goals of the project, and the testing team has another. Which document is the FIRST one that you should create to solve this problem?
Communications Management plan
Status report
Meeting agenda
Performance report
You ask one of your stakeholders how things are going on her part of the project and she says, “things are fine” in a sarcastic tone. Which is the BEST way to describe the kind of communication that she used?
Feedback
Active listening
Nonverbal
Paralingual
You’re managing an industrial design project. You created a Communications Management plan, and now the team is working on the project. You’ve been communicating with your team, and now you’re looking at the work performance data to evaluate the performance of the project. Which of the following BEST describes the next thing you should do?
Use formal written communication to inform the client of the project status.
Compare the work performance data against the time, cost, and scope baselines and look for deviations.
Update the organizational process assets with your lessons learned.
Hold a status meeting.
You have five people working on your team, a sponsor within your company, and a client, all of whom need to be kept informed of your project’s progress. How many lines of communication are there?
28
21
19
31
Which of the following is NOT an example of active listening?
Nodding your head in agreement while someone is talking
Restating what has been said to be sure you understand it
Asking questions for clarification
Multitasking by checking your email during a conversation
Sue sent a message to Jim using the company’s voicemail system. When he received it, Jim called her back. Which of the following is true?
Sue encoded the voicemail; Jim decoded it, and then encoded his feedback message.
Sue decoded her voicemail message; Jim encoded his phone call and decoded the feedback.
Jim sent feedback to Sue, who encoded it.
Sue decoded her voicemail message and Jim encoded his feedback.
You’re managing a construction project. Suddenly the customer asks for some major changes to the blueprints. You need to talk to him about this. What’s the BEST form of communication to use?
Informal written
Informal verbal
Formal written
Formal verbal
Kyle is the project manager of a project that has teams distributed in many different places. In order to make sure that they all get the right message, he needs to make sure that his project plan is translated into Spanish, Hindi, French, and German. What is Kyle doing when he has his communications translated?
Encoding
Decoding
Active listening
Effective listening
There are 15 people on a project (including the project manager). How many lines of communication are there?
105
112
113
52
Which communication process is in the Monitoring and Controlling process group?
Manage Communications
None of the communications processes
Plan Communications Management
Monitor Communications
You’re working at a major conglomerate. You have a 24-person team working for you on a project with 5 major sponsors. The company announces layoffs, and your team is reduced to half its size. How many lines of communication are on your new, smaller team?
66
153
276
406
You’ve consulted your earned value calculations to find out the EAC and ETC of your project. Which of the following is the BEST place to put that information?
Work performance information
Forecasts
Quality control measurements
Lessons learned
Which of the following is an example of noise?
An email that’s sent to the wrong person
A project manager who doesn’t notice an important clause in a contract
Garbled text and smudges that make a fax of a photocopy hard to read
When the team is not paying attention during a status meeting
Exam Answers
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Any communication that can be used for legal purposes is considered formal written communication. An invoice is a formal document.
Answer: C
Information gathering techniques are not part of Plan Communications Management.
Note
See the word “technique”? That’s a good indication that it’s a tool and not an input.
Answer: A
The Communications Management plan is the first thing you need to create in this situation. It will help you organize the meetings that are taking place and get everyone on the same page. The Communications Management plan will help you to streamline communications so that the customer can use you as a single point of contact, too.
Answer: D
Paralingual communication happens when additional information is conveyed by the tone or pitch of your voice. It’s when you use more than just words to communicate.
Answer: B
When you look at work performance data, you’re in the Monitor Communications process. And what do you do with the work performance data? You compare it against the baselines to see if your project is on track! If it isn’t, that’s when you want to get the word out as quickly as possible.
Answer: A
Note
A lot of people choose B here. Don’t forget to include yourself! Look out for questions like this on the exam too.
The formula for lines of communication is n × (n – 1) ÷ 2. In this problem there were seven people named, plus you. (8 × 7) ÷ 2 = 28.
-
All of the other options show the speaker that you understand what is being said. That’s active listening.
Note
Active listening sometimes means saying things like “I agree,” or “can you explain that a little further?”
Answer: A
This question is just asking if you know the definitions of encode, decode, and feedback. Encoding is making a message ready for other people to understand, while decoding it involves receiving the message and understanding it. Feedback means letting the sender know that you got the message.
Answer: C
Note
Any time you see anything about a formal document in communication with a client, it’s formal written.
Any time you are communicating with the customer about the scope of your project, it’s a good idea to use formal written communication.
Answer: A
He has to encode his message so that others will understand it.
Answer: A
(15 × 14) ÷ 2 = 105. This one is just asking if you know the formula n × (n–1) ÷ 2.
Answer: D
Monitor Communications is the only Monitoring and Controlling process in Communications Management.
-
There are now 12 team members, 5 sponsors, and a project manager. That gives you 18 people. Use the formula: n × (n – 1) ÷ 2 to calculate this: 18 × 17 ÷ 2 = 153.
Note
Did you get one of the other answers? Make sure you included the five sponsors and the project manager!
Answer: B
The idea behind forecasts is that you are using the earned value calculations that forecast the completion of the project to set everyone’s expectations. That’s why you use EAC (which helps you estimate your project’s total cost) and ETC (which gives you a good idea of how much more money you think you’ll spend between now and when it ends).
Answer: C
There are plenty of ways that communication can go wrong. When you send email to the wrong person, your communication had trouble—but that’s not noise. Noise is the specific thing that interferes with the communication. In this case, the garbled text is a great example of noise.
