It's back to school time, and for those of us with kids, we know we have to start getting prepared for the deluge of information that is headed our way. Everything from, parent consent forms to special after school program information packs. I'm not sure how you typically feel about all the paper work that flows between the school and you, but at times I personally find it can be overwhelming. Quite often, my children (age 9 and 13) will come back with a back pack stuffed with loose leaf notes or photocopies requesting my attention to read and sign. Every year we also get a thick school manual explaining how the school works.

During the school year, typically we get a few emails per night from the school association, sometimes multiple times a day, often quite lengthy. If that was not enough, soon, we are told, we will be receiving automated voice messages from the school as well. There is also a school web site, unfortunately, at last check, it was pretty much dysfunctional. A working one, could prove either good or bad depending on execution. Where am I headed with all of this? I want to talk about communications management. As I hope to make clear, the process of communicating effectively is kind of an art form.

On that note, I welcome you back. This week we continue our review of the 9 Project Management Body of Knowledge Areas. Our last post covered Risk Management. This week, I take a look at an often over looked piece of the puzzle, Communications Management.

What is Communications Management? It isn't how to network at the office cooler. It's not how to brown nose your boss or to charm your staff with smooth talk. In fact we all know what bad communications is. We see it all the time. So what is communications management? It's the process of creating a system of communicating with all relevant parties in your organization. It's about being effective, using the appropriate vehicle and delivering in a timely manner.

That sounds straight forward enough right? After all, you're not new to the post bail out world. You understand the limitations of various forms of communications. You understand emails inherent flaws and limitations. Verbal exchanges for changes to the project plan.  To do's that carry over month over month, until the missed project task is beyond it's point of relevancy.

Perhaps most importantly, you understand the need for the the correct vehicle of communication for the correct audience. This could mean a pdf report for your weekly report, a quick email to give your client a change of plan. Maybe it's a phone call to talk in person about an important issue, giving you a chance to work your current good relations before getting down to business. But you knew all that already, and your ducks are in line. You've got process. You've got methods. You've got a plan. But wait. Something is still telling you that all is not quite right. You ask yourself "is it me?". Why am I still so taxed at the end of the day? Afterall, all this communications is supposed to make my job of being a project manager easier, or at least better, right?

That leads me to where I'm headed with all this. Perhaps we need to refocus on our goals vs. the means to our goals. Don't get me wrong. We still need all those great communication methods that we've talked about. Maybe we just need to re-examine those processes to see what are it's true value.

I'm not going to bore you with the details of examining each vehicle and nit pick the pros and cons. In fact, if you are interested in those details such as learning how to effectively run a meeting, what are the 3 phases of a meeting and what you should be focusing on in each phase, then consider taking our in class offering. There, we'll spend considerable amounts of time examining this and much more. Today however, I'm going to jump ahead a couple of pages here, and talk about something I believe can hold a lot of value without consuming many man hours in the process. You know what I'm talking about. Yes, I'm talking about the dashboard. 

There are entire industries based around reporting. I'm not here to evaluate the individual vendors and their wares. If you are interested, I'm sure you can find lots of good information on the net. What I do want to bring to your attention is the notion of building a model of data gathering, dissemination, processing and presenting. As you may have guessed, this can take on many various forms. Anything from third party data miners, consultants, actuarial scientists to heavy number crunching computational engines. Whatever form it you find yourself in, at some point you'll want to likely have a means for presenting this great data in a clear, concise and timely manner. That means may well be a dashboard.

So what is a dashboard? In a sentence it's a simple, easy to use, easy to understand, snap shot of the state of the nation (or in your case, state of your projects). So what goes into a dashboard? Well, the short answer is, it depends on your line of business. It could be detailed information like the number of defects per hour, the number of support calls in a day, or what is the general health of your projects. All the above are what are known as metrics or key performance indicators (KPI for short). I'm going to leave it at that, that metrics are a form of measurement of performance. Using my rule of three's, a couple of metrics that I personally like to include with my stakeholders are:

1. Schedule variance

2. Cost variance

3. Earned Value 

Gathering the relevant data, massaging the data, forming the data and presenting it in a meaningful way is the end goal that we're shooting for. As mentioned earlier, it's the goal and not the means to the goal that we're going to focus on here. So we've got our dashboard, we've got the data, we've processed the data and now we just have to present the data. At this point, you may be finding that somehow you've become a report writer then an actual project manager. And you ask yourself, "how did it come to this?".

Well, to bring this chapter to it's conclusion, I'm going to say that automation is an avenue that may be your saving grace. There are all sorts of solutions out there. The key will be in finding one that is first and foremost, compatible with the data that your company stores in their databases. In fact, you may not even know it, that your company already subscribes to such a service. Secondly, you're going to need to see if the right 'fit' is there. Meaning, is it a monster enterprise engine that requires an outsider vendor certified in that technology such as SAP? Or is it something that is readily available 'off the shelf' so to speak? Maybe it's something in between. What ever the case may be, this engine will need to hook into your database, you or your data head, will invariably need to be able to run queries, such as sql queries. Or if you're lucky the vendor will have pre established hooks that readily tie into your database and pull the relevant information for you. In all likelihood, you're going to find yourself somewhere in between. If all goes well, you'll have yourself a communications vehicle that will satisfy all the above requirements that we talked about earlier. And if you're really lucky, perhaps you get all your reporting done before everyone in the office has left. 

So the next time you start thinking about who, what and how you will be presenting information, give some thought about how you will manage a potential deluge of information that could over whelm even the best of project managers. Using our earlier school example, hopefully you can appreciate that this process requires some method to the madness otherwise, that is all we're left with at the end of the day... madness! With the proper tools in place, hopefully, you'll be able to find the correct model to best help your business get the right information you need at the right time and in the right manner.

Until next time,

W. Beacon, PMP

www.ProjectMilestone.com