Project Communication

Communication is the key to a successful completion of any project. Good communication is to tailor the verbal and nonverbal language to suit the comprehensive abilities of the participants who should acknowledge that the information has been smoothly flowed and fully understood without doubt.

Internal communications should be planned strategically within an organization to enhance the support of achieving company’s priorities. Many small-medium enterprises and projects are suffering from poor and irregular communications that affect the decisions and performance negatively. Improving a bidirectional communication can be in two ways: motivating the team to give feedback on information they received and creating open dialogues. A successful leader cannot lead unless he is honest, simple and care in his communication with his team and client. This will give a support to build bridges between the stakeholders who may have different cultural and organizational backgrounds, a level of expertise, perspectives, and interests that have an influence on the project implementation and completion.

This chapter offers integral techniques to improve personal verbal and written communications. A Face-to-face verbal communication which driven by body language is one of the most effective ways to create a collaborative workspace and to develop a team approach based on mutual respect, trust, and common goals. Active listening is important to hear and understand others point of view through paying attention, sending positive signals to the speaker and providing honest feedback without interruption.

A project manager can develop policies and procedures to improve the quality of internal communication between his team members. Consider the case of Abu Dhabi Port Company, the program director who is in charge to develop one of the world’s foremost industrial zone has prohibited the written communication means within a radius of 6 meters in his workplace in order to eliminate gaps, avoid conflicts, and save time and cost.

Today’s complex developments cannot rely only on the conventional means of communication while many projects have an external and internal engagements and driven by cutting-edge technologies. In reference to B1W project that I talked about in Assignment 2, the project has more than 10 engineering consultancy firms around the world engaged in the design and pre-construction phase. During the design phase, we faced two problems: understanding the real-time status of the project and controlling documents and tasks. Therefore, the program manager decided to implement a cloud-based collaboration tool called ASITE to provide the project team members and client with a channel for communicating project status, documents, workflow and logging forms. 

For a project to be successful, it is necessary to monitor and control the communication throughout the entire project lifecycle. This will ensure the optimal information to flow smoothly among all the communication participants at any time.

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Project Teamwork (Group Dynamic)

Building a high performing team is essential to achieve a bigger dream for successful project leader. A remarkable project manager influences the talent of the team around him to accelerate the work toward accomplishing the project objective effectively and smoothly.

Sometimes it becomes very difficult to find the experienced team members that can work as one-team-one-goal in harmony without conflicts. Therefore, the project manager must negotiate to have the best members on his team otherwise he has to assign them based on availability.  

The area I found helpful in this chapter is the Tuchman's four stages of team development. The process of team development is important to reach the peak of team effectiveness and build a wining culture.

Forming is the first stage helping the positive team members to disperse the anxiety. During this period the project manager must share clear and relevant information, encourage open discussions and let the team members to know each other in order to feel comfortable.

The next critical stage is storming where the members push against boundaries because of conflicts, personalities and different working styles. Sometime the client get upset or some members don’t carry their load and create problems for somebody else in the team. Here the project manager must be proactive and resolve the conflicts through establishing a learning culture, sharing opinions and brainstorming rather than waiting the team to fall the problem on him. Some teams never passing the storming stage because they don’t move through it in healthy way and the organization ended up with an unethical culture. 

The third stage is norming where the team members start to resolve the conflicts and transform their weakness into distinctive competencies to create an extraordinary achievements. In this stage the project manager as a leader must involve the team in the managing process and coaching the team in positive way through a constructive feedback and delegation.

The final stage is performing where the team can reach this process because they are inspired, encouraged and ready to accomplish the goal without frictions. This process will create a spacious space for a leader to invest on each member by developing them to be the best and solid team.

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Project Leader

Result is the ultimate goal for business leaders to build a track record and make success stories. Every project must have a leader to manage and inspire his team to achieve project objective within certain budget and on time to ensure client satisfaction.

The successful project manager should take the responsibilities and provide a leadership in defining a clear objective, planning a road map with client, allocating and utilizing proper resources and monitoring the actual progress to keep it synchronized with the planned one.

Most of the projects are relying heavily on people. Therefore, the good project manager inspires and involves his team in the development of project plan. This involvment will motivate the team and increase their commitment toward accomplishing the work scope. A project manager's leadership qualities, skills and abilities are very important to handle the high level of projects complexity. The effective and honest communication can help to establish creditability and build trust within the team and with stakeholders.

This chapter helped me to learn in depth how the charismatic project manager should play a participative role to turn the project into an active learning and joyful environment. A good project leader creates opportunities for his team to develop and learn by urging them to take initiatives, risks and make decisions. The complexity of the projects generate many conflicts which need a proactive and smart manager to address those problems quickly and take a corrective actions without stressing out his team and creating a negative atmosphere. He has the ability to contain the unforeseen changes and transform the stress into a realistic positive energy to lead his team toward success. 

I also learned that the project manager must manage the time wisely and guide the project team to prfioritize their work. To save time and empower the team members, a project manager must delegate the tasks elegantly by controlling the delegated task without being in the details. The project manager can not preventing scoop creep and managing changes unless he has the entire team involved to detect and defend the scope through establishing a change control system, process and procedures.

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Project Objective

To develop a mobile healthcare station that provide high-quality, convenient and affordable telemedicine services within 12 months and budget of $250,000.

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Resources Utilization and Project Closing

I chose chapter (6) resource utilization because it is directly connected to the company profitability, project success and customers satisfaction. The various types of resources are mandatory to produce the end deliverables. It constrains the accomplishment of the objectives by delaying the schedule if it is not utilized optimally. Many projects are suffering from exceeding the level of available limited resource which negatively affect the implementation of the project schedule. At that point, a special previsions might be taken to speed up the work such as hiring additional resources or contractors. From the real work life, adding additional resources might not be approved easily by the client or the upper management (CEO or CFO) due to the overall cost strategy.

Here where this chapter helped me to understand more in depth the resources optimization techniques that will prevent the possible conflicts that will affect the deadlines of accomplishing the projects. Those conflicts might happen because of twofolds: the over or under allocation of resources and the fluctuated utilization of the resources especially when they are limited. 

Technically it is possible to move forward on several tasks at the same time, but if we can’t apply the same resources for all of those tasks simultaneously, then the work will not be done. In this case, the Resource Leveling and Resource-Limited Scheduling methods can be applied to adjust the activities starting and finishing dates based on available resources. These methods help to balance the project's needs with resource supplies. When those techniques applied, the critical path length extended as one of the result, but that reflect the reality of the project environment not because of the delay in any manner, rather because only certain resources are available and can’t work on the same activities at the same time. By creating the expanded timeline with taking into account the available resources, this may provide a space for schedule compression by having resources work overtime in order to make up the expansion of time that might happen because of the limited resources.

On the previous lecture’s lab, we learned how the project management information systems can provide a powerful management features. It helps to consolidate the resources to show who does the work and when. It gives the ability to use resources effectively by assigning the resources to the tasks.

I chose chapter (9) closing project because it is necessary for a project manager to wrap up the project, evaluate it, get everyone paid and move on to new one. A few years ago, I experienced several projects that never ended because of different reasons such as: 

• A project that has been initiated then turned to be a business process because of the ambiguous objectives or infinite ending date.
• A project has been terminated by the client and the performance bond liquidated because the contractor ran out of cash liquidity.
• A design-build project stayed for more than 5 years in design phase because of feature creep.
• A contractor who have been terminated because of conspiracy between the sub-contractor and client, then the project failed.
• A contractor who have been in reimbursement mode and was not able to complete the project because the mother company bankrupted.

The above cases drove me to learn more about how the projects should move smoothly into the final phase of the project life cycle in order to be officially closed and signed off by the client.

Once the problems are cleared, there are several activities that need to be performed in order to get the project closed. One of the most important actions that I learned from this chapter is how to identify and document the lessons learned. I would consider it as the greatest gift that the project manager can have not just at the end of the project but through out the entire duration of the project. 

In every project, there are positive results of the lessons learned that we want to continue doing it in future works and negative results that should never happen again. It typically impacts the cost, time, work scope, quality, process and moral of the team. The lessons learned must be documented during the entire project by establishing a real time log to document the lessons and provide a smooth access to distribute, reassess and discusses the lessons by the project’s stakeholders. 

The other important key for the project manager is to keep the project alive through measuring and monitoring the client satisfaction in order to avoid the termination of the project. No matter what, the project manager must close the project.

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Projects Identification and Selection

In this ever changing world, the multilevel enterprises that manage a group of companies and activities are facing various internal issues that need to be addressed, and external opportunities that need to be considered. Defining those business problems and opportunities will have a significant influence on project identification process. The careful effort and time to recognize the needs are essential to initiate the project lifecycle and to answer practically how to identify and select projects. The upper management is facing massive challenges to decide which project must go first based on priority, greatest benefits and available resources.

B1W Project, a unique - state of art - mixed use development located in prime waterfront downtown of Abu Dhabi in the UAE, has been identified through a strategic plan between the owner and the master developer of major tourism destinations in Abu Dhabi. The focus was to foster a lifestyle that is occurring in the city, and to meet the social needs of the young and active people in a dynamic, stimulating and also leisurely environment. The  projected financial outcomes indicated project IRR in excess of 15% after the end of year 1 of operation and increasing in subsequent years.

The B1W project is owned by a diversified conglomerate that owns and manages a substantial portfolios of companies in various business disciplines. Each company has its own on-going and future projects that should focus on and have it completed. The headquarters decided to develop an evaluation criteria to assess the tangible and intangible benefits of the projects. Deloitte was hired as a consultant to evaluate and study the impact of each project in different criteria. The overview estimates and financial analysis indicates that B1W Project is highly ranked among others as a profitable project with the highest overall benefit. The Chairman (owner) and his experienced committee decided to select the B1W and to give it a high level of priority to move on first. Hence the owner authorized the program director to invite the top 10 contractors to bid for B1W by sending them a request for proposal.

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Project Management Introduction

In the past few years, the demand on getting things done professionally became an absolute need in everyone life. Mastering the art of managing the sequence of unique and interdependent set of activities toward achieving a clear objective within a finite life span and certain budget by utilising diverse resources is a practical answer to How Things Happen in any project.

Accomplishing specific objectives using a formal project management will have a significant impact on the quality and satisfaction. Projects that are driven by technologies and performance are changing the shape of the business in terms of reliability and automation. 

Project management is generic and not limited for a specific business discipline, and is implementable in different discipline regardless the scale or the purpose. To host a dinner, plan a wedding, develop a web-based applications or build a skyscraper can all be considered as projects.

Who Let Things Happen? The project manager and his team are playing a vital role to the success of the project. However, the successful project manager finishes the project and closes it for a primary high level client within estimated budget and certain period of time. In order to maintain the constraints and avoiding the scope creep, project manager is responsible to define the work scope and to structure the baseline plan on certain assumptions of time and cost, and to identify the resources and risks. Project Managers lead, communicate, coordinate and collaborate with the insource and/or outsource stakeholders who are involved and keen to complete the project and meet the acceptable standards.

A smart project manager takes the advantage of utilising the tools and techniques such as Gantt Chart, Work Break Structure and Cost Estimates, to plan, perform, control and evaluate the project’s processes with the assistance of computer softwares. Enriching knowledge and developing skills through Project Management Associations Programs such as PMI will positively influence the project manager ethics and performance. 

What happen once a project is Done? Successful project managers have a clear vision about their objectives, and better understanding of the prevailing culture and the economic forces, therefore they are capable of accomplishing their projects. Their great achievements allow them to gain more confidence, reputation and experience which enables them to  start newer and more advanced projects.

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Welcome To My Blog

Welcome! This is my 1st post I composed by using OC's email address and Google's tools during the 1st class of Project Management and with an assistance of Dr. Dray's instructional video.

Infront of Harvey Business Center

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