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Real World Project Management - Communications - Part I

March 27, 2008 | Author: admin | Filed under: Communications Management, Conflict Management

Real World Project Management - Communications - Part I (#1 in the series Real World Project Management - Communications)
By Joseph Phillips

Have you ever been on the side of the conversation where all you heard was a voice like Charlie Brown’s teacher? “Wa-wa-waa-wwaa.” (That’d be funny if you watched more Charlie Brown.)

Or how about listening to your date? Yada, yada, blah, blah, Cubs game, blah, blah, beer, blah, blah, pizza.

Or what about when your favorite project team member enters your office. He says, “Hi. Got a real problem I could use some help with. I’m having a tough time understanding the project requirements on this deliverable.” And you hear, “Blah, blah, blah, problem, blah, blah, tough, blah.”

It’s not that you don’t mean to understand your date or your project team member–it’s just that you’re not listening. You’ve got a bazillion things racing through your head, you’re focused on seven different projects, and the baseball steroid hearings were so frightening that you can’t decide how your fantasy baseball league will shape up. (That’s shape up, not shoot up.)

Communication, as you can tell from the above, is more than just talking. Communication is also listening. When it comes to project management, communication takes up 90% of a project manager’s time. That’s right–90% of your time.

I communicated something to you and you did what I asked. If only projects were that easy! Sometimes you, the project manager, have to do a lot of begging and pleading, like I did above, just to get your project team members to do what they need to do. You know what needs to be done and you need to transfer that knowledge to your project team members. And then they go do it.

Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work.

Real communication is about transferring knowledge. You know something and you tell someone else, and then they know it. But it doesn’t always work that way, does it? Communication is tough. There are two big categories of communications: written and oral.

Joseph Phillips is the author of five books on project management and is a, PMI Project Management Professional, a CompTIA certified Project Professional, and a Certified Technical Trainer. For more information about Project Management Training, please visit Project Seminars.

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    • This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 and is filed under Communications Management, Conflict Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

    1 person has left a comment

    In the real world, people don’t always listen when you talk. That’s because the information is not urgent or important to them at the moment. You have to frame the conversation from the other person’s point of view to make it relevant to them. If not, you’ll be in the “Convo Do Loop”; communicating the same thing over and over and over with no results.

    - Simone Brown

    StockTheMind Consulting and Training wrote on March 28, 2008 - 9:39 am | Visit Link

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