This document discusses managing communication in projects. It emphasizes that effective communication is important for project success and avoiding conflicts. It recommends creating a formal communication plan that identifies stakeholders' needs, distribution methods, schedules, and responsible parties. It also suggests designating communication periods and limiting excessive communication to allow focused work. The document advises tailoring messages for different audiences and choosing appropriate channels based on the message, receivers, and timeliness needed. Project managers should identify proper communication channels to ensure the right information reaches stakeholders while reducing noise. They should also monitor communication flows and address any issues to keep project teams well-informed and aligned.

1. Managing the Communication in
Your Projects
Instructor: Inam Ullah
Graduate Course: Information Technology Project Management
Department: Institute of information Technology
Quaid-i-Azam University Islamabad

2. Significance
• Most of the project conflicts are the result of miss-communications,
incorrect information sharing, use of inappropriate language, tones
and delayed communication.
• The communication approach defines your project team
environment , project team working culture and most importantly
knowledge about the project itself.
• Team members need the timely information and also want their
concerns and issue addressed timely. This can only happen with
effective communications
• All the stakeholder should get the right information from the right
source in the right format at the right time.

3. Create Communication Blackout Period
Self Communication Management
• Avoid excessive communication, its time consuming and
yields low output.
• Try to get the time for yourself to do the real work rather
than just managing the communications called. where you
don’t read any email or reply email or the people can’t bother
you.
• May be close your office door, sit in some conference room or
put Don’t disturb status.
• Have dedicated time for the emails rather than checking &
replying emails all the time.
• Try to have short meetings ~ 30mins , large meeting mostly
lead to waste of times.

4. Plan Your Project Communication
• Its pivotal that you have some formal communication plan to
be shared with the project team/stakeholders
• The team needs to know what information need to be
communicated with whom at what time through what means.

5. Identify Communication Requirements

6. Develop Comm. Plan
• The communication Plan should documented one
• Should include project stakeholders and their communication
needs
• The information distribution mediums
• The time when information need to be communicated
• Designate the communication people e.g. Spokes persons,
external and internal communication people.

7. Information Distribution
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Ensuring the right info reaches the right people at right time in
right manner
Share the communication plan with your team to ensure that
everyone stay aligned with the communication strategy
Make sure that your team members are well informed on the areas
of their concerns
The information might include
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Performance Reporting: How the project is doing? Task completions,
Schedule, Budget?
Project Challenges
Updates in the Project plans
New Risks etc.
Both Good and bad news both need to be communicated timely

8. Typical Communication Flow

9. Message Contents
• Single most important aspect of message formulation is to
understand your message’s receiver. The culture, language,
preferences etc.
• Ensure the accuracy of the message contents
• Use formal and ethical language
• Avoid unnecessary jargons, slangs and words interpreted
differently by different people based on their social norms,
family backgrounds or cultures
• Use proper grammar, format ( e.g. Font’s, colors , spacing)
• Avoid unnecessary lengthy details to save every one’s time

10. Choice of Communication Medium
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Choice of the medium will depend on the contents of the information,
location of the receiver, preferred medium, level of the socialization and
the type of the communication (formal/informal)
For example you can’t deliver detailed information such as written
document or CD on phone email post, upload on ftp path may be good
idea. Short message may be delivered on email or chat or phone call.
Also important aspect is the sentiments, expressions in the message that
can be corrupted by the selected medium
Timeliness of the message : For example- sending quick information
through a courier to the stakeholder at far end part of the world will
takes it days and weeks to reach instead Email or call can immediately
communicate that information.

11. Communication Channels
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Project manager responsibility is to optimize the message flow through
communication channels
Typically there are N(N-1)/2, where is the Project team members/stakeholders
So for a team of 20 people , the #communication channels = (20-19)/2 =380/2=
190
It is very important that all the team members are well informed about the
project & also correctly
Not every team member in the project team need to get the information from all
the channels, only correct & authorized channels will have correct information
Important thing is to reduce the communication noise and excessive
communication flows which may lead to communication errors and waste of time
and destruction of team culture.
The project manager’s responsibility is to identify the proper channels for the
team members and the information dissemations process.

12. Communication Channels
(continued..)
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If one person on your team misses a piece of key information then that can
have an impact on others or the whole team.
Also on the other hand If a team member has to check with more members
of the team to get something done then that often not only increase the time
to do the task (often to get consensus) but the potential risk that it will take if
a single team member is miss informed
If The latter in turn made as the responsibility of the project manager, it
would at least take 50% of his time daily to ensure that project information
are routed to all members which becomes almost impossible when the team
size gets more bigger.
In this scenario the Project manager have to introduce the team hierarchy for
the information distributions.
PM might communicate with the level 1 team leads which in turn need to
pass on the information to /from the team members. With increasing team
size the level of the hierarchy can also be increased.

13. Communication Control/Monitoring role of PM
(Study by Jeff Hodgkinson)

14. Communication Role of the PM
(Study by Jeff Hodgkinson)

15. Thanks