Communication management is one of the most essential skills and knowledge areas for successful project management, each project should include a communication management plan where it could be part of project documentation for small projects, or a separate document. By all means it should cover stakeholder communication requirements, the type of information to be communicated, recipients, frequency and escalation procedure for problem solving (Schwalbe, 2010, p.387). Schwalbe stresses on the importance of project communication plan as it guides all stakeholders with agreed upon guidelines, it is important because not all team members have good communication skills, and this plan will help them understand communication requirements for a project.
Communication the proper information at a proper time for the proper person is the ideal goal in any project. There are plenty of ways were team member can distribute information across; technology is one of the heavily depended on mediums to distribute project information and organization communication in general. Team members could use email, instant messaging, collaboration tools, wiki’s or websites to exchange information, project manager could set internal project management information system to organize project documentation, schedule meetings, document minutes of meetings, and change requests, this is useful for large project to help share and make information available for everyone. Still relying only on technology for project communication is not enough, face-to-face meetings is crucial for project success, as sometimes words might be incorrectly interpreted or misunderstood, scholars stress on the importance of body language and tone for successful communication (Schwalbe, 2010, p.391). It is important to use informal communication to distribute project information, some team members might prefer to have coffee chat about project rather than reading status reports, as it helps them more in giving the proper feedback and understand issue clearly with verbal communication.
When it comes to project performance information, mainly there are two types to distribute it, reporting and forecasting. Reports are used to distribute work performance information and measurements (Schwalbe, 2010, p.398), there are two types for reporting those are status reports, and progress reports. They differ in the time frame for each of them, status report “describe where the project stands at a specific point in time” (Schwalbe, 2010, p.398), it describes whether the project is meeting, time, scope and budget or not at a certain time, on the other hand, progress report “describe what the project team has accomplished during a certain period” (Schwalbe, 2010, p.398). Other form of performance information reporting is project forecasts; by this project manager guess future progress and status of the project based on previous information and trends (Schwalbe, 2010, p.398), forecasts help in estimating project budget, time required to complete certain tasks and so on. Other than those two forms of reporting, status review meeting could be used to distribute project performance information, in such meeting top management get status review feedback and update on project performance, and discuss important project isses.
Communication management plan is crucial to set the guideline for project communication; it helps team members to better communicate and report progress to project manager and top management. Project communication could take multiple forms and types, such technology based communication, or face-to-face. However for performance information distribution formal communication, which takes the form of reports and forecasts, is the best way to distribute it.
Reference:
Ronald L. Thompson, H. Jeff Smith, Charalambos L. Iacovou, The linkage between reporting quality and performance in IS projects, Information & Management, Volume 44, Issue 2, March 2007, Pages 196-205, ISSN 0378-7206, 10.1016/j.im.2006.12.004., Available from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378720607000031. (Accessed 7 January 2012)
Schwalbe, K., (2010), Information Technology Project Management (with Microsoft Project 2007 CD-ROM), 6th ed., Course Technology, 2010, ISBN 978-0-324-78692-7
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