According to the PMBOK, approximately around 75-90 percent of a project manager's working time is consumed by formally or informally communicating about the project. Therefore, it is quite easy to predict that the correct management of communications in project management directly affects the success of the project.
The communications management process in project management includes collecting, distributing, storing, and organizing this information after the creation of project information under the guidance of the Communication Management Plan, providing access to the relevant people without difficulties when necessary.
In the stakeholder management knowledge area, we've discussed the importance of stakeholders who are affected by the project in some way or have the potential to affect the project in some way in terms of the final success of the project. That is why effective communication between project stakeholders and between stakeholders and the project team will fundamentally affect the process of ensuring stakeholder participation.
Manage communications process is where we actively carry out the planned work in the communications management plan. Since there is a continuous necessity to communicate information in all parts of the project, manage communications process is continuously conducted throughout the project.
In addition, valuable information such as reports generated during the monitoring and control processes, progress measurements, performance information, status reports realized in terms of scope, time, and cost, the current status of risks and problems are collected and distributed to relevant stakeholders and the project team in this process.
Project Communications are the only output of the process.
What are the Inputs of Manage Communications Process?
- Communications management plan: This is the main plan that will guide to carry out the execution of communications management.
- Resource management plan and Stakeholder engagement plan: The communications between stakeholders and project's human resources are needed to be planned by taking these both plans into consideration.
- Stakeholder register: Again, this process is all about satisfying receiving and giving information necessity of stakeholders. So we need to know their existence, their influence over the project.
- Quality reports: This is important to deal with communication of quality-related issues. Especially specific stakeholders who have effects on quality will be benefited from this document.
- Risk report: Information about risks and their sources, specific risk responses will be necessary to communicate to specific stakeholders.
- Work performance reports: This document is itself communicated to the stakeholders, so it is a natural input to the manage communications process.
- Change log: Some of the changes or change requests would affect some of the stakeholders for sure. Therefore you need to communicate applied, approved, and rejected change requests to related stakeholders.
- Issue log: You need to inform stakeholders about issues that happened on the project and you need to let them know their status about these issues.
- Lessons learned register: You may extract helpful inputs and beneficial knowledge for managing communications from the lessons learned register.
- Enterprise environmental factors: Personel administration policies, risk appetite or risk tolerances of stakeholders, already established communication channels, existing communication tools in the industry, global and regional trends, geographic distribution of facilities and resources are examples of EEF's that are recommended to use in this process.
- Organizational process assets: Your organization's policies and procedures for communications, policies, and procedures for risk or change management, organizational communication requirements and historical information from previous projects, including the lessons learned repository are common OPA's of the process.
Tools & Techniques of Manage Communications Process
- Communication methods: In this process, we need to use a variety of different methods.
- Communication technology: Technology is a natural tool of communications management.
- Communication competence: It is simply to know what to do, what to say in terms of communications.
- Feedback: These are great opportunities to improve the efficiency of the process and keep the things on track.
- Nonverbal: Nonverbal communications are as important and potent as verbal ones in most situations.
- Presentations: These are key tools especially in meetings with key stakeholders or senior management to share information in a professional manner.
- Project management information system (PMIS): This is a common term to refer a system to organize, store or convey information. There is a variety of options to use as a part of PMIS.
- Project reporting: Reporting is a common way of communicating information.
- Active listening
- Conflict management
- Networking
- Political awareness
- Meetings
- Cultural awareness
- Meeting management