Project teams have numerous communication options available to keep information flowing. It’s now possible for stakeholders to communicate a lot, but the growth of messaging technology has also complicated project communications. The proliferation of messaging channels has reduced the focus on efficiency and communication quality and overemphasized volume and convenience. It’s easy to overlook messages amid so much noise and difficult to sift through the sea of communications to surface meaningful insights.
To eliminate delays caused by unstructured communications, project teams should regain control of their messaging framework. By establishing clear protocols and optimizing communication channels, project teams can boost stakeholder engagement, minimize delays, and enable consistent project success.
Identify and assess your entire communication environment.
Between dedicated messaging apps, chat capabilities built into project management platforms, document management solutions that support comments and group editing, and other niche communication technologies, project teams can easily have a dozen or more conversations simultaneously across multiple channels. It’s no surprise that project participants struggle to track critical discussions or that they lose sight of how the initiative is progressing. Once you understand all the places project messages live, you can optimize your communication strategy to fit your team’s unique needs.
Eliminate communication channels that don’t provide value.
While different stakeholder groups may prefer different communication tools, maintaining low-use or ineffective channels leads to communication silos and the potential for missed messages. Consolidation will help you maintain visibility into who is communicating and what they say. An underutilized channel—or one that lacks the necessary controls and audit capabilities—is fertile ground for lost messages and miscommunications. Remove these potential vulnerabilities so people aren’t wasting time hunting through irrelevant or unnecessarily messy message streams for critical information.
Pare down the notifications.
With so many communication tools in rotation, the volume and frequency of reminders, updates, and alerts can soon distract your team from the actual work. This makes it difficult for stakeholders to understand what’s a priority, what requires quick action, and what’s simply informational. Urgent matters may not be addressed in a timely manner, leading to missed deadlines and overlooked tasks. The cognitive overload makes it difficult for stakeholders to identify helpful information, and it also extends the time it takes to sift through the alerts to find the essential messages.
Set clear expectations around asynchronous communications.
Project groups have fewer face-to-face interactions thanks to hybrid work arrangements and the convenience of digital messaging. Still, over reliance on async communications can easily lead to misinterpretations and lost context. Help your stakeholders understand which messaging channels should be used if they need timely responses (hint: it’s not your async platforms), and remind them that complex discussions are better suited for real-time settings. A brief onsite meeting or a quick video chat can allow everyone to state their position, ask questions, offer opinions, and negotiate. Waiting days for back-and-forth messages to work through a time-sensitive topic will only lead to delays.
Centralize your documentation.
When your team has multiple versions of project documents spread across different communication platforms, you risk creating confusion about the status of any changes or comments, which version is the latest, and what will happen once everything is finalized. Sponsors and executives might make decisions based on outdated or incorrect information, and the resulting misalignments will likely be expensive and time-consuming to fix. You can reduce documentation sprawl and the problems it causes by centralizing your core project data. Maintaining a single repository for documentation and other information can streamline data retrieval while allowing team members to use your communication channels to send links back to a master or in-progress document.
PMAlliance, Inc uses a team of highly experienced and certified professionals to provide project management consulting, project management training and project portfolio management.