CSO News: Effectively Communicate to Project Teams

Effectively Communicate to Project Teams

Communication is the cornerstone of effective project management. This is a fact well understood by all project participants. The most difficult portion of a project often is effective communication to team members. The more people involved in project, the more complex communication tasks become, and at times seems to increase with the number of participants.

By Anna Korlyakova
Marketing Manager of CS Odessa.

Daily Communications Tools

Meetings

In project-based companies, the use of daily, weekly and monthly meetings are a common practice. This methodology is implemented in software development, as well as, sales and marketing workflows. As projects sometimes require immediate feedback, consistent meetings are very useful. Daily meetings are usually focused on critical tasks for the project that need immediate attention.

Secondary tasks that do not require daily meetings can be addressed in weekly or monthly meetings.

Email

Email is an obvious way to quickly communicate back and forth with team members. Individual tasks and reports can easily be sent and received to one or many project participants. Using email to communicate, helps keep information flowing between all members of a project.

Project Dashboard

A simple graphic representation of current project status gives all project stakeholders a quick and easy to understand visual assessment of project status. In less than a minute, stakeholders are able to view project data that are not as easy to visualize in paper reports. The purpose of dashboards is to communicate project status as a whole picture, unlike other project management tools that only provide project status details.

Summary

Information flow is vital to a project. ConceptDraw Office was developed to enable project participants to stay “focused”, by providing them with information about accomplished tasks, process details, necessary next steps, and to identify critical tasks.

Do’s	Don’ts
Communicate with project team on regular basis.	Irregular, chaotic communications slow down team productivity.
Email and visual dashboards to prepare to meetings. This will make meetings shorter.	Don't utilize daily project meetings to micro-manage the team.
Write email with one topic and one document attached.	Attach multiple documents in a single email.
Meeting participants should be those, who works with related tasks.	Leave messages without respond.
Present information in a clear and concise manner.
Use email for effective time management.
Use Preview Image functionality when sending graphical reports via email.
Ensure communication is two-way.