Communication is Key to Successful Project Management

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eric.shaw

Project management is an art, and project management is also a science. This is my understanding of project management.

It is a science, because it includes all aspects management knowledge. When it comes to project management, people naturally think of its eight major elements: scope, time, cost, quality, human resources, risk, procurement, communication. A successful project is closely related to all these factors.

However, in the actual participation of project, we can find the factor which associated with most of the activities is the project stakeholders; project stakeholders generally include the customer or user, the project team, the project company’s managers and other major stakeholders. In the project management, time, cost, quality, human resources, risk, and procurement are related to communication. How to set up a successful project teams? How to play full potential of team in the project? How relationships with customers are maturing? How to do customer satisfaction? All these are communication management, and the project manager must master the skills.

To carry out all elements of communication, to manage all related people, project manager should stand on stakeholders’ perspective, from their needs and interests to achieve their maximum value through the project. If out of these, it is difficult to make project success.

In the development of software, the communication style of requirements management affect the accuracy of the requirement baseline, the same in the project design and development process, the communication result between project members and project manager directly affect the success of the project. The key goal of communication in project is to maintain the progress of the project, identify potential problems, requests for proposals to improve project performance. If the communication is carried out improperly, the project will failed unexpected.

Communication in project management has its inevitable and irreplaceable important role. In the 1995, Standish Group study found that IT project success is related to three main factors: user participation, management support, requirement clear. All of these factors are dependent on having good communication skills.

Early in the project, the project manager in addition to the preparation of a good communication plan, but also to understand how to manage team, and how to meet the needs of customer, standing on the roles of stakeholders, so as to achieve a successful project targets.

Speaking of project management is an art, not only refer to the communication skills with stockholders, most of project managers can blindly memorizing the eight elements of project management, but how to control them flexibility, making these elements more suitable to the actual operation of the project, it requires the project manager having art management techniques in the operation. Management rules are surely died, but people are living. In every field of project management, these communication skills are generic and hold the other project management with the requirements of the relevant elements of the.

How to use the art of project management flexibility in practical work, ensure that the project greatly meet customer’s needs, guide the project towards the goal of success, this is the key thing every project manager should consider and carefully implement.
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