Transcription
There's an unattributed saying that says that project management is 80% communication. Now, I don't know if that's true, but it's certainly correct in spirit. So, what are the absolute essentials you need to know about project [Music] communication?
Let's start with the audience for your project communications. There are three primary groups we need to consider. First is your project team. These need your communication to be a part of your day-to-day project leadership. They need you to keep them informed about what's going on. They need to understand what you expect of them, and they need to be aware of what is going on in and around your project.
Second are the governance tiers of your project: your client, your sponsor, your project board, your steerco. These individuals and groups need to understand what is going on in your project so that they can properly discharge their duties to oversee your project and to make the important decisions. Your primary means of communication are both formal and informal meetings and your reporting.
Finally, there are the stakeholders to your project: the people who care about what is going on and can influence, in some way, the outcome of your project. These can be both internal or external to the sponsoring organization.
As a project manager, you need to communicate effectively with all three of these communities. However, we are going to focus in this video on your stakeholder communities.
There are four components to project communication, and which are your strategy, your plan, your delivery, and your response. We'll look at these one at a time.
Number one: Strategy. For each stakeholder group, you need to examine what you need from them, what the aim of your communications is going to be. There may be a number of different aims, but fundamentally, you need to assess the degree to which your communication is about satisfying your stakeholders' needs or towards meeting the needs of the project. Now, hopefully, your stakeholders' needs and your project's needs will overlap to a high degree, but that won't always be the case.
So, this will give you a large number of strategies. A representative sample of them includes the following:
Accommodating: a strategy in which you will make make substantial concessions to a stakeholder group in order to achieve your core objectives.
Next is collaborating: this is where you work closely with the stakeholder to jointly pursue mutually beneficial outcomes.
Consulting: is the strategy you'll apply when you need to understand the perspectives of your stakeholders because they have either insights that you need so that you can deliver the project effectively, or they have priorities that you want to meet.
However, sometimes your strategy will simply be informing: making sure that your stakeholders are up-to-date with the most relevant information. This is about sharing what is going on openly, but not so much about listening to the points of view of your stakeholders.
A promotional strategy is one where we use promotional and persuasive tactics to influence the views of our stakeholders. This is the sort of strategy we'll apply where we need our stakeholders to commit to and accept what it is the project is trying to do, but they don't at the outset.
A defensive strategy is stronger than a promotional strategy. Here, you will resist to a large degree any attempts to make compromises whilst putting forward strong arguments in favor of your point of view.
Finally, an assertive strategy is one one where you are prepared to fight hard to optimize the position of either your project or the sponsoring organization.
Number two: Plan. Once you know what you want to achieve with each stakeholder group, the next step is to figure out how to do this. This takes the strategy and puts a plan around the tactics you can use to deliver that strategy. Typically, your key stakeholders will each have a plan for your communication with them. It will span the whole lifespan of the project and may evolve as the project evolves, so that your communication plan for a given stakeholder will have different stages to match the changes in what the project is doing and where the project is.
For your lower priority stakeholders, or perhaps those in large groups, your broadcast stakeholders, the plan will be simpler. You might have a plan that spans a number of different stakeholders and stakeholder groups. However, the elements of communication planning, whether it's for key stakeholders or for lower priority stakeholders, are essentially the same. And we have a full video on how to create a stakeholder communication plan, but I will summarize it in this video too.
Your stakeholder communications plan needs to cover eight things, and the first is your theme or your objectives: and what is this message or set of messages all about, and what does it aim to achieve? Second is topic or message: what is the message you're going to deliver? Third, we have target: what stakeholder or group of stakeholders do we want to communicate this message to? Four is tone: what is the appropriate tone of voice for this message? Are you going to be inquiring or informing, testing or telling, consulting or commanding, instructing or influencing? Fifth is the tool or the medium you will use to get your message out, or sometimes it will be multiple media. There are a huge number of media available to us as project professionals, so be creative. Choose the right tools for the stakeholder that you're addressing and for the message you need to impart. Sixth is timing: when do your messages need to go out? This may be an individual date, or it may be a sequence of dates, or it may be a frequency for periodic communications like updates and progress reports. Seventh is test or feedback: how will you know that the message you have put out to your stakeholders has been received? And if it has been received, how do you know that it's been read or listened to? And if it has, how do you know that your stakeholders have understood it in the way that you intended? And finally, if they have understood it, how do you know that they have acted on it in the way that you'd hoped? Getting feedback from your stakeholders to assess how your message has landed is vital for any organization, for any project manager who wants to take responsibility for their communication.
Finally, at number eight is the teller: the person who is responsible for both planning, drafting, reviewing, issuing, and receiving feedback on the particular communication that we're talking about. No plan is worth having if it doesn't allocate responsibilities for each action.
Effective communication brings together the right match of medium and message to the stakeholder and the context. But remember, there is one rule of good communication above all, which is that the best communication of all is face-to-face, in-person communication between two or more individuals. This, however, is not always possible. So you do have a range of alternatives.
There are remote but in-person approaches like telephones or video calls, and we're getting really good at those now. There is written communication: text, illustrations, notes, formal reports, text messages, or email. But be aware that email is probably the worst form of communication, not just because it is so overused, but because when I send an email, I think of it as a casual message. When you receive an email, you assume that I've written it carefully, and that mismatch can often lead to miscommunication.
And finally, there are a range of new tools that kind of combine written and in-person communication: things like Slack and Teams messages, which are in quasi real-time and have an element of being in-person, but are really just written messages. They can become overwhelming, so do not overuse them. But if a whole team or a whole stakeholder group signs up to them, they can be very effective indeed. It's worth mentioning that there are a lot of technologies that support all of this, but that is outside of our scope.
Number three: Delivery. Part of your social and political calculation will be the right level of formality for delivering your message to get the optimum result. This can range from informal to formal to highly official communications. Each has its own merits and its own risks, so evaluate this one carefully.
In all of these, there are a number of considerations that you need to pay attention to. And beyond the message and the medium that you use to deliver it, these are the meta-messages that carry information at the psychological and emotional level, distinct from the written messages or the spoken messages, the content of the words and the language that you use. Examples include the tone you convey: either the tone of your voice and your gestures, or the written tone of voice. These can carry subtle levels of assertiveness and can also convey doubt, uncertainty, or even deceit.
Second, people can interpret things from the choice of the words you use. Often, in most languages, there are more than one word that you can choose to convey a particular meaning. The way you express yourself in language carries hidden messages.
And finally, there are the nonverbal signals that you send out from your body language, your gestures, your facial expressions. These can signal, again, the same sorts of things: deceit, concern, doubt, uncertainty. This is also true remotely. The kind of stationery you use, the font you choose, the layout of your messages, all convey subtle things.
Finally, under delivery, there are a number of specialist forms of communication that project professionals need to understand, learn, and master as part of our career progression. It's outside the scope of this video to discuss them in any detail at all, but let's list them so that you know where you need to research if you have a gap in your knowledge. These include conflict management, negotiation, influencing and persuading, presentation skills, meeting management, and networking and political awareness. You'll find videos on these on this channel, and I'll put some links in the description.
Number four: Response. Finally, as well as our planned communications, which can be one-way outgoing, or indeed planned incoming communications, or two-way dialogues with our stakeholders, there will also be responses that you cannot plan for. You can plan for the fact there will be responses, but you can't predict what they're going to be or when they're going to come. Day-to-day, you will have comments from your team, but I'm more thinking about your stakeholders and your governance tiers who will approach you with ideas, with questions, with points of view.
As a minimum, you need a process for receiving and logging incoming calls, emails, and messages. Then you need to be able to ensure that an appropriate person receives these and can deal with them. And finally, you also need to ensure that they get a response, and that that response is recorded as well, so that there is an audit trail and other project team members know what's going on.
For your most important stakeholders, it can be very helpful to allocate one of your team members as the key point of contact for that stakeholder. If they're very important, then you might also want to have a backup second team member who can pick up contact should the first team member not be available.
Another approach is to have a dedicated communication team on your project. This is an approach taken on many of the largest projects, particularly ones with a big political dimension. And this doesn't have to be a capital P political dimension like national or regional politics. It could simply be that there is a huge level of community or social interest in what is going on, or perhaps the project is just simply highly contentious within a large organization. This communication team could come from within the sponsoring organization, or it could be contracted out, possibly to a specialized communications agency or PR agency.
So, to close, stakeholder communication is a huge topic, and one I could speak all day about, and in fact, write a book about, which I have. It's called "The Influence Agenda: A Systematic Approach to Aligning of Stakeholders in Times of Change," and you can get a copy of it anywhere where you buy your books, but of course, I'll put a link to it in the description. For any project manager that wants to go deep into stakeholder engagement and communication, this book is more advanced than pretty much any that you will find. It's suitable for mid-career to advanced project managers, but it's written so that anyone who is interested can read it. It's full of great ideas and resources, and it's highly practical with many tools and templates, as you'd expect from me.
Please do give this video a like if you've enjoyed it or learned from it. I'll be creating loads more great project management videos for you, so please do subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell so you don't miss any of them, and I look forward to seeing you in the next one.