Maintaining healthy communication channels throughout a project’s lifecycle can be challenging. You need to harmonize your messaging across a dynamic set of functional areas and project participants when the effort is complex. In long projects, you must also find a way to keep the various stakeholder groups engaged over an extended time horizon. Ensuring that you gather all the necessary information, evaluate it for accuracy, flag any missing data points, and deliver it to stakeholders in a clear, concise, and timely manner is a significant lift.
If your project communication strategy has become inefficient or ineffective, partnering with a project management consultancy can help ease the workload and improve the quality of your information flows.
Coordinating project communications with your consultancy partner acting as a hub gives you full-scope visibility, including work assigned to outside collaborators. Most strategic projects involve a wide range of supporting providers, and maintaining workflows that ensure you can gather, review, and report on the data coming in from multiple vendors is a significant undertaking. Centralizing project reporting through your project management consultancy means nothing slips through the cracks and your external partners know where to send updates and queries. Your internal group can more easily maintain awareness of vendor activities and identify new opportunities to optimize or consolidate those relationships.
Releasing your routine project communications to a consultancy gives your team more bandwidth for strategic activities. An experienced partner will supplement your internal professionals and provide your team with more comprehensive, accurate, and timely insights into your project’s status and health. For teams planning and executing a major(or majorly complex) project, the ability to hand off day-to-day communications without losing sight of the associated information is key to success. There’s too much data flowing through your project—estimated supply delivery dates, questions about conflicting specifications, milestone updates—to risk missing the critical elements. Your project partner can capture and interpret all those communication flows, then package and deliver the data to suit different stakeholders’ needs.
Knowing how much is at stake, your team must be confident that information coming from each functional area and outside vendor is reliable and complete. A project management consultancy brings objectivity and a neutral perspective to your communications strategy that helps smooth out information sharing across internal and external participants. Everyone benefits when project communications are accurate and timely, as well as reliably transparent. Even if the news coming in is bad, you want your messaging to be free of fear and blame. When a project partner communicates project information and status to you, it’s unbiased and there’s no sugarcoating unwelcome information. Instead, every message is based on facts, enabling your team to swiftly assess the information and act (or not) as you deem most appropriate. Awareness increases, worries diminish, and stakeholders become comfortable bringing issues forward.
A trusted project management partner can elevate and streamline your communications, enabling your team to work on strategic issues that are critical to project success. An experienced consultancy will tailor your project messaging and ensure transparent, unbiased, timely, and relevant information flows at every stage.
PMAlliance, Inc uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project portfolio management.