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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