Project Communication Series: Project Schedule

With the project schedule being so important to tracking the overall status of the project, I can’t guarantee that this is the only article I’ll write in this series on it.  There may be more to come – so be forewarned.  It’s just that it’s such a critical part of any project whether you’re utilizing it to it’s fullest extent with all tasks, resources, hours, dollars, etc. loaded or whether you’re just entering tasks and dependencies and updating it weekly with revised % complete information.  It’s all tracking, it’s all project communication, and it’s all good.

Along with the status call and the status report, the project schedule is a form of communication that needs to happen on a regular basis every week.  Just like team meetings and customer meetings that become irregular, if you stop producing updates to the project schedule and delivering them to you team and your customer, they’ll never feel confident that they know the current status of the project.  They won’t know if what you’re delivering to them is accurate and current, from last week, or just a best guess.

This goes back to earlier things I’ve written on project management characteristics and being organized and doing what you say you’re going to do.  In the project kickoff meeting or during planning sessions on the project, you hopefully set team and customer expectations on the communication aspects of the project.  Hopefully, you even produced some semblance of a Communication Plan that documents when you’ve agreed to produce regular communication documents and hold specific meetings.  The key is to adhere to those as much as possible throughout the project.

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Project Communication Series: Customer Interfacing

This is more of a general thought in the entire communication process than any one specific communication strategy.  If you subscribe to the same notion that I do – that the process of effective communication is the single most important thing that a project manager does – then you understand that how we interact with the customer is critical to the overall success of the engagement.

Just as important as the project manager’s communications with the customer are the individual project team members’ communications with that same customer.  The part that becomes hard is that as the project manager you’re responsible for ALL communication, but you can’t always police that which you are not a part of.  Nor do you really want to, but it does all come back to you.

So the questions then become:

• How do we (the project manager) best interface with the customer
• How do we prepare our team to interact with the customer
• What actions do we take to oversee all communication
• What do we do when the communication goes wrong?

Project manager – customer interface

The primary function here is to practice frequent and effective communication with the customer.  Most of this done through the creation of informative and accurate weekly material: status reports, project schedules, issues and risks tracking sheets, status calls, and status call notes among other things.

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Project Communication Series: Planning Meeting Agenda

I wanted to use this series as examples of basically all the types of communication that can and does happen on a project.  Since I have no real vision yet of format, it can really be anything.  Specific examples, templates, etc….anything worthy of discussion as relevant and necessary communication on projects.  I still feel that effective and efficient communication is the most critical responsibility of the project manager.  If our readers on here have suggestions of things to cover as part of the communication series, please send them to me or comment on this or subsequent articles.

Below I’d like to present something I found in Carl Pritchard’s book, “The Project Management Communications Toolkit.”  It is basically a template for the project planning meeting agenda – which, as we all know – is a very critical team-to-team communication point on any project.

Here is Mr. Pritchard’s summary for this agenda….

Purpose

Project planning meetings are held, as the name implies, in order to develop all or part of the project plan. They are intended as both data gathering and data-organization sessions. They are intended to generate not only the project plan, but a consensus on that plan and its implementation. The agenda serves as a guide for how these sessions will be held.

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Project Communication Series: The Project Status Report

I’d like to go through a communication series and cover every aspect of what’s involved for effective communication on the project with the team and the customer.  Requirements may be the lifeblood of the project, but communication is the beating heart and without proper, effective, and efficient communication no project can succeed.  And that all starts with the project manager.

In the first segment, we’ll start looking at the project status report.  Because it is something that is produced weekly, contains up to date status, and drives the weekly status call with the team and customer (at least in my methodology it does!), it is one of the most critical pieces to your project management puzzle.  Skipping it or slacking on its information is really not an option.

If you share my belief that the project status report should drive the weekly status call, then all relevant project status information should be included.  In fact, look at the status report as something that you – the project manager – could produce and give to just about anyone and they could then drive the project status meeting.  This serves two purposes:

• It allows you to miss a meeting if you have an emergency or another project needs your attention
• It gives you something that you can hand to your senior leadership at any given time and say “here is the current status (within days) of ‘x’ project”

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Five Signs You’re Not Cut Out to be a Project Management Consultant

Consulting, in general, is not for everyone.  Likewise, consulting it the field of projectmanagement is not something everyone is ready to handle.  Even if you’re a 15-year veteran of project management, that doesn’t mean you have the tools, the stability, and the make-up to go out on a limb as a consultant in your given field.

We all know that project managers have a few skills and characteristics that they must have to some degree to be successful:

• Leadership
• Communication
• Organization
• Confidence, etc.

The list can go on for quite awhile.  Those are still necessary for the project management consultant, but let’s look at five key signs which can point to individual characteristics that should be present to help enable you to be a successful consulting project manager.  If you don’t have them, it’s probably not a field that you should be in.

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