One of the most important responsibilities project managers have is communications.  Good project managers spend up to 90% of their time communicating.  In today’s economic business climate, in order to keep projects or engagements funded, project managers must continually “market” the positive benefits and achievements of projects – even when they are approved.  This is certainly true for high profile, publicly funded initiatives where the whims of politics come into play.  It is not uncommon in these cases for program managers to become road warriors, traveling to customer sites in order to maintain stakeholder mindshare and keep the project sold.  However, even with internal corporate projects, it can be all too easy for executives to decide to cancel them, in order to launch the latest favored initiative, unless they are constantly given good reasons not to.  Unfortunately, the project team does not have the luxury of simply working hard and delivering the project according to plan – in a communication vacuum.  The project manager is the project ambassador and must never take the sponsor’s good will for granted.  Therefore it becomes imperative to maintain the passion and enthusiasm for the goals and objectives of the project through constant impactful communication.

Most people think of communications in the obvious ways such as status reports and presentations, but quality, meaningful communications can take place in any gathering and in many written forms – weekly team meetings, tollgate reviews, reports, schedules, etc.  Savvy project managers learn to turn all the routine rituals and sacraments of projects into opportunities for meaningful communication.    Typical project venues and artifacts should always be scrutinized with a goal of maximizing communication effectiveness.  For example, it becomes crucial to make sure project schedules are relevant and informative for the business stakeholders who consume them.  After all, the project schedule contains the key piece of information that stakeholders are keenly interested in – the team’s status against milestones.  Therefore it should be maintained in a form that can always be easily used as a visual aid in meetings.  In the next installment of this series, we’ll discuss in more detail how to construct relevant project schedules to communicate exactly what you intend to your audiences.