PMI CAPM – Communicate with Project Stakeholders

1. Section Overview

It’s been said that 90% of project management is communication. When you consider all of the people that you have to talk to, including your project team, your customers, management, your sponsor, vendors, and government agencies, it’s no wonder that that little statistic was probably made up on the spot. Well, in this lecture, in this section, we’re going to talk about the plan, communications management, executing communications management, and controlling everything it takes to do the communications management knowledge area. So in this section, we’re going to talk about creating a communications management plan. Because the point I’m trying to make is that communication is paramount in project management. We have to communicate effectively on a regular basis, with intention, and communicate that intention so people know what to expect from us.

This knowledge area on communications management is tied to stakeholder management, the new knowledge area in the pinbox. Stakeholder management used to be kind of folded up here into communication management planning. Well, now it’s broken apart. They are, however, still directly related to stakeholder management because—who are you communicating with? Stakeholders. So keep an eye on this chapter in light of those stakeholder management activities that you’ll be tested on on your exam. We begin by defining the communications management process.

I’ve already mentioned it a couple of times. The communications management plan is all about answering some questions about the information you want to communicate. So who needs it? What are you going to communicate? Who can access that authorised information? Who’s going to provide the information? When is the information needed? What modality? What about time zones or language differences? So those things have to be addressed in this plan. We’ll look at a little math formula here. Don’t worry, it’s not hard. It’s pretty straightforward. It just shows the number of communication channels, with a communication channel being between one person and another person.

Essentially, the more people you have involved in your project, the more channels you will have. We’re going to do this little formula here. It’s kind of neat, and you might see it on your exam. We’ll also look at the communication model, a sender-receiver model, and what are the components of that model? We’re going to manage communications, meaning that we’ll follow our communications management plan. This means we’ll be doing five activities as defined in the communications management plan. We’re going to create, collect, store, distribute, and retrieve communications. So we’ll see that in this section.

The communications management plan tells us how to manage the flow of communication. Managing communications makes certain that that’s happening among our stakeholders. We’ll look at that information distribution technique. So how do we distribute? What about the technique, the model, and the writing style? Managing meetings is part of information distribution, followed by some facilitation techniques. You’ll notice a lot of facilitation. A lot of times, it means just meeting with management and facilitating conversations, making sure the right people are talking to one another and having the right conversation.

This is also in this section, where we’ll begin to create reports. So doing some performance reporting based on Earn Value Management So we’ll talk about performance reporting. We want to control communications. We want to ensure that the right information is given to the right parties at the right time. And this means not only from the project manager out, but people have to contribute information to the project as well. So we’ll talk about performance reporting, status reports, and the like, then go back to earn-value management because that shows project performance. So based on that performance, that is how we will communicate a lot of information here in communications management. Let’s hop in and do this section right now.

2. Plan Project Communications Management

It’s been said that communication is 90% of project management. When you consider all the people that you have to talk to for a project, it’s easy to see why that statistic often holds up. So let’s talk about project communication management planning. This is from Section 10: “Planning Communications Management.” Communication is critical to project management success. You need to be a good communicator to have good projects. This is based on creating a solid project communication management plan. A key objective for our conversation here is to define how communication will be managed and controlled.

That’s the point of having a communications management plan. And this is directly linked to the new knowledge area in the Pembach Guide, Fifth Edition, which is stakeholder management. And we’ll also talk about stakeholder engagement. A lot of that is based on communication management. Okay, let’s look at our communications management plan and the process of creating this plan. Our end here is that we’ll need the project management plan. The stakeholder registers enterprise environmental factors and organisational process assets. Some tools and techniques include: communication needs analysis Who needs what information, when do they need it, and what’s the expected modality? Some of those types of questions Communication technology. What are the approved ways that you can communicate? A memo, email, texting, web chat—all sorts of different ways to communicate What are the communication models?

We’re going to look at the most common communication model that’s coming up and then tie communication methods right back to our technology. But we’re also talking about face-to-face communication and nonverbal things like that. So we’ll look at that in a little bit more detail up ahead. And of course, meetings are one of the best ways to plan communication management because you get to talk with people about what they want in the project. As far as communication goes, we have two outputs here in terms of planning communication management. We get the communications management plan, and we’ll receive project document updates. Who are the stakeholders? That’s who we’re going to be communicating with. Stakeholders are the people or organisations that have a vested interest in the project. Recall that we have positive,  negative, and neutral stakeholders. We have to communicate with all of those people. Your project can affect people for better or worse.

Some of those people are going to exert influence over the project. So we need to keep a close eye on who these people are. What are your concerns going to be? And that will help guide us into the types of communications they’re going to want, need, and expect from the project manager. One of our inputs, or one of our things that will be related here, will be the stakeholder register. The stakeholder register functions similarly to a phone book of all of our stakeholders. However, it is more than just identifying the people; it is also an assessment of their wants and needs, threats, and even perceived threats regarding our project. So that helps us direct communications accordingly and understand what they expect of or think about the project. It’s also a way to classify stakeholders. For example, we could say these are end users, accountants, or people who live in this neighbourhood if there is a construction project. So the stakeholder register is another way to classify people as well. And we’ll see more about this when we get into stakeholder management in module 13 of the pinball. So the project communication management plan is our goal for planning communications. It answers a lot of questions.

So we’re going to answer questions like, “Who needs what information?” and “Who’s authorised to access that information?” Who’s going to provide the information? It’s not always just the project manager that’s sending information out. It could also be the PM receiving information. When do stakeholders need communication? What’s the expected modality? Is it a memo, an email, or another particular form? So what modality is needed to satisfy that communication need? Where will the information be restored? We need an information retrieval system as part of our knowledge management system. So it’s a way that we can quickly get to emails, memos, forms, or what have you so that we can pull that information back, which becomes part of our supporting detail and will also become part of our future historical information. What about time zones,  languages, and cross-cultural issues? How do those all affect communication? So these are all questions that need to be addressed in your communication management plan for your exam. You need to know this simple little formula about communications planning. It’s a communications channel, so it’s N times N minus one divided by 2, where N represents the number of stakeholders.

And yes, the project manager is a stakeholder. So let’s say you have ten stakeholders on your project. So the plug-in to this formula would be ten times ten minus one divided by two. So that would be ten times nine, which would be 90 divided by 245, meaning that there are 45 communication channels in this project. So you can see that the larger the project, the more communication channels will exist. What this really shows us is that there are more opportunities in a larger project for communications to fail. You know what happens? People misunderstand something, and then they gossip. And then that person twists it a little bit, and before you know it, you’ve got this wild rumor flying around based on just a tiny nugget of truth. So this communication channel formula is just a way of showing how complex communication can be with even a relatively small number of people in a project.

When I teach a beginning project management course, we’ll take like seven or eight people and make a little circle. There are these different spools of yarn, and we’ll take one colour of yarn and go from one individual to everybody else in the circle, and then the next individual is a different colour of yarn, and we repeat the process. It’s just this massive mess of all of this yarn running from person to person. But you can really see how complicated communication is with even a small number of people in your project. So know this formula. Now, one thing that we want to be aware of is a challenging question. It could be that this week you have 23 stakeholders and that next week you’re going to have 28 stakeholders. How many more communication channels would exist? We would first have to solve for 23, then solve for 28, and find the difference. We can’t just find the difference between 23 and 28. So let’s try this out right now, but I’m going to open up a calculator, and in our calculator, I said there were 23. So we’ll try our formula: 23 times 22 divided by 2253 channels.

So I’m going to write that down: 253 channels. Next week, we’re going to have 28 stakeholders. Okay, so we’ll do the same thing: 28 times 27, 756 divided by 2378. So the difference of 378 minus 253 means you’ll have 125 more stakeholders and 125 more communication channels just by adding five stakeholders to your project. So there you go. That’s the communication channel formula. It’s not difficult, but it’s a little tedious, and you might have one question about it. I wouldn’t get too excited about it. Let’s go ahead and move forward and talk about our communications requirements. So what are some things that can help us identify our communication requirements? Things like an org chart so we can see in our organisation who reports to whom can help develop our communications management plan, stakeholder responsibility, and stakeholder relationships. Again, who reports to whom, and what stakeholders may have completely conflicting objectives or competing objectives?

We can get back to that idea of force field analysis and things like that. What about the different disciplines, departments, and specialties that are involved in the project? So we have to look at those individuals and think about the type of communications they are going to want and the frequency of those communications. And really, just asking people what they want or expect is fine. A lot of times they’ll defer to you, but other times they may have some expectations for when they want information. This introduces the logistics of the participation. So the bigger the project, the more complex the communication, obviously. So you think about the logistics: how will you satisfy all these communication needs? And to create a schedule or a cadence of communication early in the project and stick to it is so important. Internal and external communication needs Obviously, within your company and within your project, you’re going to have people you need to talk to. But you might have to deal with government agencies, the media, or different homeowners if you’re doing a construction project.

So that may not always fall to the project manager to do those types of communications and then stakeholder information, but understanding their assessment or doing an assessment of the stakeholders and understanding how they feel about the project can help you make better decisions about the project communications that are required. I mentioned communication technology. First off, we have to understand what the appropriate way to communicate is. So often, the message should guide how we communicate. If there’s a disaster in the project, I probably don’t need to send a text message. You don’t have to talk to someone in person or over the phone. So the type of message affects our communication decisions. Also consider the importance of the information. Again, if the project fails, a phone call, a face-to-face meeting, or an email message mailed to someone’s address are most likely inappropriate. What about the availability of the technology? We assume that if we’re texting or sending emails, everyone has those capabilities all the time. Sometimes you’re out in the field somewhere and you have no phone signal.

You are unable to receive text messages or emails. So given the availability of the technology we need to consider, how simple is it to use that technology? So we think that Skype can be very challenging for some people, while for other people it’s not a big deal. So maybe you have to do some training with whatever technology you choose for the project environment. You may have some rules and regulations about how you are allowed to communicate and what you’re communicating. If you think about classified information, you think about sensitive information, confidential information, where that information is stored, and who has access to it. So all of that ties into communication technology. For your exam, you’ll need to understand this communication model. It’s not difficult to understand; there are just a lot of terms here that you’re going to have to nail down. So let’s look at this model. It’s a sender-receiver model. I’m the sender, and you’re going to be the receiver. I want to send you an email message. I write the email message in the software over here in Google Mail, and I’m going to send it to you.

Well, my email program, Google Mail, will be the encoder—it packages it up and whatever magic Google does there, and it sends it across the internet to your email server, which will be the decoder through your software so that you can receive it and read it. So I’m the sender. The email system is the encoder. the internet or the network. There is the medium, and on your end, your email system is the decoder, and you are the receiver. So that’s pretty true for all types of communications. A fax machine, a face-to-face conversation, a phone call We have these same components in all of those models. Sometimes, though, we might have a disruption in the message. So something that distorts the message like when I use some slang or an abbreviation that you’re not familiar with. So if we’re talking on the phone and they’re static or you have a bad connection, you might interpret that differently or quite literally.

I’m driving through a tunnel or something. Then that can introduce some noise, a distraction that distorts the message. So noise is anything that twists the message or distorts it, preventing you from really understanding what I’m talking about. Then we could have a barrier to communication. A barrier could be that your email system is downright now or that you didn’t take your phone with you, so you’re not receiving on your phone my messages, my text messages, or the emails that I’m sending. So that’s a barrier. Or if we’re talking face-to-face and you speak French and I speak German, we’re going to have trouble communicating. Sometimes when we communicate, you get an acknowledgment. So even if an email is sent to some systems on the same network, there can be an acknowledgement that it was read. A feedback or response is just that—you get some response back to the message. So it’s feedback. Communication methods fall into three categories, and they’re pretty easy. Interactive communication. You and I are sitting down at the table. We’re having a conversation. I talk, and you talk.

We’re talking about pushing. Communication is one-directional, like a letter in the mail or an email from me to you. A pool. Communication is like a web server or a database, where you query information and pull information. Push and pull are very interactive. All of this leads us to our communications management plan. And there’s a lot of stuff wrapped up in this communications management plan. We have stakeholder communication requirements. We have the information to be communicated—the reason, the time frame, the frequency, the cadence—all of which are defined in our communications management plan. We have the person who’s responsible for communicating the information, and the person who’s responsible for authorising the release of confidential information may not be the project manager. Also in our plan, we have methods or technologies we’re going to use.

What resources are allocated for communication activities and the escalation process? What’s our method for updating and refining this plan? Stakeholders may ask that their schedule be changed. So you might be doing a status report every Friday, and then stakeholders say, “You know what?” I just need this once a month. So you have to update your plan to reflect that new change. Do you have a glossary of common terminology used in your discipline? It is always a good idea to have a flow chart of the project’s information flow and any communication constraints. Anything that you have to do or anything that limits your options, you need to document that in your plan. All right, good job. brings us to the end of this really detailed, packed lecture about the communications management plan. It’s so important for the exam, but it’s also really important for your role as a project manager. You’re doing great. making a lot of progress here. Keep going. I’ll see you at the next lecture.

3. Manage Project Communications

In this lecture, we’ll talk about managing project communications, or the day-to-day activities you perform when communicating in your project. So, when we talk about managing communications, we really mean sticking to your communication management plan. That we’re talking about how we’ll create, collect, store, distribute, and retrieve communications, and that this will ensure the flow of communication among project stakeholders? Let’s look at our eDo for this process. Obviously, we need our communication management plan because it directs us on how to do these activities work.

Performance reports, enterprise environmental factors, and OPA tools and techniques Here, communication technology is used. So how will you communicate? What are the accepted modes of communication? The communication model discussed in the previous lecture, as well as the various modes of communication—formal, informal, face-to-face, phone call, web conferencing—are all influenced by communication technology, information management systems, and then performance reporting of our outputs. Here we have the actual project communication. You might have updates to your project management plan, your project documents, and your OPA.

Let’s look at some information distribution techniques. We’ve already talked about the sender-receiver model. As if I were sending you an email, we have the sender, the encoder, the the medium, the decoder, and finally the receiver. The choice of media is influenced by the message that we’re sending. So, a text message versus a formal report, as well as the writing style. So if I just need to get a quick update from a team member, a text message may be fine. But if I’m creating a summation for my project, that’s going to be more formal and have a different writing style. Part of information distribution is meeting management techniques. For meetings, we need a structured approach to make sure that they’re productive and effective. So this includes things like an agenda that’s distributed before the meeting, that you have someone keeping notes like ascribe that will keep the minutes of the meeting, that you follow the agenda, that you watch your time, and that you don’t take too long or too short.

So meeting management techniques, keeping people involved, facilitation techniques where you bring people together who need to talk, and then you help them get that conversation started so that everyone has the information they need. A term that we’ve seen throughout this course pop up occasionally is “information management system.” This can be part of your PMIs. It’s also where we keep hardcopy documents, such as memos, letters, reports, press releases, or any other supporting information that might end up in a folder or filing system. Now electronic communications are a little bit easier to manage, but sometimes those can be unwieldy as well. So you consider how difficult it can be to find emails if you don’t have a good structure for storing your email messages. same thing with faxes. If you still fax videoconferencing websites, any type of web publishing that you might do, like a project website internally, and then electronic project management tools, So web software like SharePoint has some of those capabilities.

Microsoft Project Primavera Basecamp—all of those things are going to help you be better organised in your information, which all your communication contributes to. And what you’re communicating is the information in your project. Performance reports. A performance report shows how the project is performing. This is also known as a status report. So, in a performance report, this is sometimes referred to as an exceptions report, where you have a variance or a variance report. An exceptions report means you have an exception, something wrong with the time, cost, or scope, usually. So an exception report is just a way of communicating how healthy the project is. So you might use this prior to project meetings. You would distribute this forecasting so that we can get into that estimate at completion. We can look at other projects and how well they perform, and then do benchmarking against our own. To use an analogy, you may need to do some work reestimation.

So, if the project is seriously behind schedule and on budget, you may need to recalculate how long and how much it will take to complete it. Furthermore, performance reports may be where we communicate any external events that have had an impact on our time or budget. So maybe we were waiting for an inspector to sign off on the work before we could move forward.

And that inspector was late, and late could be a market demand, like supply and demand. So the cost of airfare went up, or the cost of materials went up. So it could be something external. And so we’re allowed to explain that in a performance report. The results of information distribution are stakeholder notifications, which let people know what’s happening in your project. It’s a good idea to do this on a regular basis. When I’m managing projects, I do a status report every Friday morning. It’s pretty boilerplate, pretty quick, and easy to read, but I make sure that all of my stakeholders who need to receive the status report receive it every Friday, and then people come to expect it. Project reports are more formal reports that detail how the project is progressing in terms of time, cost, scope, quality, and risk.

So those are big project reports that you do on a regular basis. Maybe not every week, but maybe once a month or every six weeks. Whatever schedule you determine in the project—communications management plan, project presentations—these become part of the information that we’re going to archive, any project records. So all those status reports, all those project reports—those become part of future historical information and will also be feedback from stakeholders. So emails and any type of communication they give back to you, you want to document that and keep that as supporting information. And then, of course, lessons learned—those lessons learned are not just a conversation. You write it down. It’s an actual document that you’re creating. All right, that’s the result of information distribution. brings us to the end of this lecture. Just a quick, easy lecture about communications management You’re doing great. Let’s keep moving forward. I’ll see you at the next lecture.

4. Control Project Communications

Now we’re moving into a monitoring and controlling process, which is to control project communication. This is all about ensuring that the project communications management plan is followed and that we are doing what we promised. In the pin box, this is ten three. to control communications. It’s all about getting the right information to the right parties at the right time so that it follows and enforces the communications management plan. It ensures optional information flow among all the parties in your project. Let’s look at our EDO for controlling communications.

Our inputs here are the project management plan, the actual project communications, the issue log, work performance data, and OPA tools and techniques. We have that information management system that we talked about, expert judgment, and meetings. Our outputs will be work performance, information change requests, project management plan updates, project document updates, and OPA updates. Controlling communication is something on which we will rely. A lot of this will be on our information management system. So how organised are you as the project manager? I know you’re well organised great.It’s that other guy I’m worried about. We’ll rely on expert judgment.

So leaders in the organisation are going to help ensure the right message is put out to our stakeholders. Sometimes, when a project is kicked off, the project sponsor, the CEO, the CIO, or what have you send out a message announcing the project and the expectations of the project and the people involved. So you might receive periodic communications from a leader in your organization. You could bring in consultants to make sure you’re crafting the right message for the recipients, especially if it’s like a construction project that’s affecting the community. Subject matter experts can contribute to what exactly is happening in the project. And then, if you have a PMO, they may have forms or templates or even manage certain communications for you. And meetings, meetings, meetings. Face-to-face communication is so vital. Way back in Chapter Seven of the Pinbach, we talked about earned value management. comes back again with our communications, performance reports, and forecasting.

So here’s a little refresher. Performance reports. Remember, the status report just says, “How well are we performing progress measurements, forecasts, and baselines?” If we look at this little chart here, our progress says, where are we right now? So it’s our time and money invested up to this point in the S curve. Recall that our step funding requirements are a way to have some intermittent funding in our project budget. You don’t get the whole thing at once. Forecasting would be linked to this as well. Based on current experience, I can predict where we’re likely to end up. And then our baseline is what we thought it would be compared to what we’re actually experiencing. And where there’s a difference between what was planned and what was experienced, that’s where we have a variance. And so we may have to do a variance report or an exception report to explain what the problem may be. Now, forecasting is all about expected value management when we talk about a time series method. So this is the most common.

I’ll list some other ones here. I wouldn’t worry about these too much. The one that we really want to pay attention to for the exam is earned value management, the time series method. We can extrapolate all those other formulas and indexes and where we’re going to end up forecasting some other time series method because we say this is the value based on what we’ve done so far and what we’ve spent and where we should be. moving average, extrapolation, linear prediction, trend estimation, and growth curve. Judgmental methods, intuitive judgements, opinions, probability This is all about instinct, about your experience, and about your gut feeling on the project. So we have two to four forecasting methods here. Other forecasting methods We have causal and econometric methods. So again, I wouldn’t worry about these too much. I would just be generally familiar with causal and econometric methods.

So causal factors for experiences Why are you experiencing what you are? linear regression, looking backwards in order to predict where we’re going to go. And then we have auto-regressive, moving average, or ARMA, and econometrics. You don’t have to know much more than that for your exam. Only superficially familiar Other forecasting methods include running simulations, playing what-if games, and using probabilistic forecasting. So what are the odds, the probability, and the impact if certain events happen? And ensemble forecasting? You might have one or two questions about all of those forecasting methods, but it’s most likely going to be about earn value management because it’s the only one in the pinbox that’s explained in detail. brings us to the end of this section. In terms of our lectures, the next one will include a learning game on project communication management. I know you like those, so you can take a little bit of a brain break, don’t have to list, talk for a little bit, hop out and play a learning game, and then move on with the course. Great job. We’re getting closer and closer to the end of the course. I know you’re excited about that. So keep up the motivation, keep up the positive energy, and keep pressing forward.

5. Section Wrap

Great job! You did it. You’ve reached the end of this section on communications management. This section contains a wealth of useful information. So we began our conversation talking about planning and communication management. Communication is paramount in our project, so it only makes sense that we have a plan to carry out that communication to show our intent to define how communication will be managed and controlled. And of course, you saw in this section that communications management has a direct link to that new knowledge area, stakeholder management. As a result, we’ll see this again later in the course.

We discussed communication management and planning, as well as some critical information. Who needs what information, when do they need it, what modality do they need it in, who has access to that information, who’s going to provide the information, and where are you going to store it? And if necessary, how are you going to address time zone or language differences? So lots of things are answered for us or our intent, at least in the communication management plan. We looked at the communication channel formula, n times n minus one over two. So a little bit of math is involved when it comes to communications planning. Remember the model. Remember the communications model. Think about an email system: you have the sender, the encoder, the medium, and you receive it, but before you do, you’re the decoder, and then you’re the receiver. Disruptions could be noise.

You have a barrier, not a variance; a barrier may prevent us from communicating and receiving acknowledgements. So acknowledgement, you shake your head, and you get a little receipt that has been read, or a response, feedback, or response, or communication model. In our edo, we talked all about managing communications and what our edos may be for managing communications with the intent to create, collect, store, distribute, and retrieve communication. So that’s all part of our information management. And then we talked about performance reporting. We do performance reporting like estimating to completion or estimating at completion. We could do an analogy with benchmarking. Remember, sometimes we have to do a work reestimate based on our estimates being bad, so they were bloated, wrong, or too aggressive, so we have to pause and reestimate the work. The performance reports also give us the opportunity to explain why there’s a variance.

It could be something external to the project; it could be the time; it could be the cost; there were fluctuations that we hadn’t considered or a risk that came true. Whatever the case may be, this will be a performance report. So these are known as “variance reports” or “status reports.” You might also see a variance report called an exceptions report. In our last process, we talked about controlling communication and ensuring that the right information is given to the right people at the right time. And then that gets back to earned value management and forecasting. So we talked about earn value management, indexes, and completion estimates, and so on. All right. Great job. There is really a lot of information here in the communication. Most good project managers like you are really good at communicating. So this, I imagine, was really approachable for you. All right. You’re making great progress. Keep going. Have confidence in yourself. I know you can do this.