Communicating

Communication is the glue that holds an organization together. Without clear, timely, unambiguous communication, even a small team collocated together will have serious problems. And if the team is distributed geographically, poor communication will render an already challenging situation nearly impossible to control. Effective communicating encompasses much more than just communication infrastructure such as telephone, e-mail, file sharing, and collaboration tools. It deals with oral and written messages, reports, and presentations. It involves moving information across functional boundaries in a form that will be understood. How do you plan good communication into a project? What infrastructure is needed (and not needed)? How do you make effective reporting of project status a structural part of the project? How do you keep your team armed with the information they need, without information gluttony or starvation. How do you make the precious time spent on meetings, presentations, and reviews more effective?

• Click here for Burning Questions and know-how on Communicating

• TEMPLATES:
  
  • Action Item List Formats
  • Recording Key Project Decisions
  • PM Appointment Letter
  • Executive Summary of Project Status/Risks
  • Brainstorming Meeting Techniques
  • Effective Meetings Checklist
  • Speaking Up – How to Make Your Case
  • Issue Resolution Status Report
  • Meeting Evaluation Guidelines
  • Establishing Meeting Ground Rules
  • Preventing & Solving Meeting Disruptions
  • Meeting Minutes Formats
  • Milestone Table with Driver Tasks
  • Problem-Solving Tools and Techniques
  • Project Alternatives Tradeoff Table
  • Project and Pipeline Status Report - 3 page format
  • Project Escalation Process Guidelines
  • Project Stakeholder/Influencer Assessment and Communication Plan
  • Team Member Status Report
  • Project Status Reports
  • Project Team Leader Description - Roles & Responsibilities
  • Project Team Organization and Assignments
  • Responsibility Allocation Matrix
  • Project or Software Release One-Page Summary
  • Team Meeting Agenda
• PAPER: "Best Practices from Experiences in Facilitating Virtual Meetings" arose from the authors' work facilitating 100 virtual meetings, both for the Navy and other related organizations. These meetings included idea generation, planning, decision-making, issues surfacing, status briefings, environmental scanning, collaborative writing, training, and expert briefings. From this experience the authors identified their set of lessons learned, and honed a set of best practices for addressing these lessons. The lessons and practices cover specifics in areas like effects on virtual meetings when the groups are in different timezones, how to get all parties to follow an effective meeting process, and how to deal with issues with virtual meeting technology.
• ARTICLES:
  • Safer Status Emails
  • Dispelling Fear: Something to Get Exorcised About
  • The Challenge of Using Shared Personnel: Can a Skunk Help?
  • The Perfect Project Review (There Ain't No Such Thing!)
  • Being "Relevant" As Managers
• ARTICLES: The following journals often have articles on Communicating-related subjects:
  • Innovative Leader
  • Today's Engineer
• BOOKS: Check out our list of books on communicating.