The forms of Communication

Project managers are orchestra leaders according to Dr. Stolovitch (Laureate Education).  An orchestra leader is responsible for making sure that all of the musicians are playing together harmoniously. 

Have you ever wondered why Dr. Stolovitch (Laureate Education) would compare a project manager to an orchestra leader?  I have and so in my preparing for this blog I decided to define each role.  An orchestra leader is a person who directs four sections of an orchestra but before he can do that this he must do the following:

The conductor makes sure that the music piece is interpreted properly by acting as the guide to the musicians or singers. He chooses and studies the music score, may make certain adjustments to it and relay his ideas to the performers so that when the music is played, there is unity and harmony. He schedules rehearsals, plans the orchestra's repertoire and attends to other matters concerning the group he leads (Estrella, n.d.).

A lot goes into being a conductor of a symphony and a lot goes into being a project manager.  A project manager is responsible for coordinating all aspects of a project (Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton & Kramer 2008, p. 10).  The project manager develops all of the objectives of the project, the goals, and budget, develops a team and monitors them plus a plethora of other task all fall to the project manager. In order for a project to go smoothly the PM must communicate with their stakeholders. Dr.  Stolovitch says he read somewhere that 93% of communication is not in the words.  It is in attitude and the spirit of the person doing the communicating, the body language and tonality of the person as well as the timing which are all ways of communicating with a person that are not verbal.

Communicating with Different Modalities and my Interpretation:

Phone: most of ongoing oral communication is done by phone.  I think this a good way communicate if the PM cannot conduct a face to face meeting.  Phone conversations can be used if there is a quick question that needs to be answered or if there is some task that needs verification, but if the PM is going to utilize the phone to contact people they need to make a written notation in a notebook or somewhere within their paperwork that a call was placed on a certain day, what was discussed, whether or not an agreement had to be reached and what were the terms.  The notation should also include the name of the recipient.

There are drawbacks to a phone conversation such as the parties cannot see faces and facial expressions and sometimes seeing how a client or team member responds can tell if they understand or agree with what is being said.  The PM has to be careful not to divulge information that all team members need to know, so that there is no backlash over having favorites. 

Meetings: these are live meetings and should be utilized if there is something important that has to be said to the team and the stakeholders.  These meetings can be beneficial because there is information that the entire team may need.  Portny et al. (2008) provides the following tips for conducting a meeting (p 360):
-Set a purpose for the meeting
-Notify people in advance
-Start on time
-Assign a timekeeper
-Take written minutes of who attended
-Keep a list of action items to be explored further after the meeting and assign responsibility for all entries on that list.
-If the right information isn’t available or the right people aren’t in attendance to resolve an issue, stop the discussion and put it on an action item list to deal with later.
-End on time

These are good tips because stakeholders often work on more than one project at a time and so they will need to plan accordingly in order to meet and get task completed in a timely manner.

The drawbacks to meetings is that sometimes they are poorly planned and rehash information that the team members can read on their own, they can run over time and there is no clear purpose to the meeting.

Email or Memo: these methods work well if the written correspondence contains these tips provided by Stolovitch (Laureate Education):

-Begin with a clear purpose
-State the situation i.e. are deadlines being met; what is incomplete or is completed on the project
-Include possible solutions
-Indicate if a sign off is required
-Specify the form that the response is required to take
-Keep tone of all communications business friendly and respectful

Drawbacks could be that if team members and stakeholders do not realize that this is a form of communication that will be used the PM must make sure that when they start a project that they let the groups know what forms of communication will be used so that the written correspondence will not be taken for granted.

Summary: Communication is very important to the life of a project because the PM cannot do everything and those involved in the project need to be kept in the loop as to what is going on.  The most important I learned from this lesson is that I set the tone of communication with my team members and stakeholders.  Stolovitch (Laureate Education) provides the following guidelines:
-Let them know the frequency of communications
-Apprise them of the type or types of communication that will be used
-Tell them the language that will be used
-Establish rules on who can talk to who on the project for information exchange
-Avoid ambiguity because ambiguity kills
-Document everything; keep a journal that you can jot down conversations
References
Estrella, E. (n.d.). The conductor?  Retrieved from http://musiced.about.com/od/musiccareer1/p/theconductor.htm 23 January 2014.
Laureate Education Inc. (Producer). (n.d.). Communicating with stakeholders.
[DVD]. Baltimore, MD.
Portny S. E., Mantel S. J., Meredith J. R., Shafer, S. M. Sutton M. M, and Kramer,
B. E.  (2008). Project Management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling
projects. Wiley Pathways 59-72.

 

 

Project Post Mortem

Project Post Mortem
So this week in Project Management 6145; I am writing about a project that I took part in while I was a teacher, since I have no real world experience in the field of project management I will use a personal experience.  Are you like me and wonder what a project post mortem is?  Because the word post mortem is usually associated with death and we all know that is a tough topic I found this definition by Portny, Mantel, Meredith, Shafer, Sutton and Kramer 2008,  a post project evaluation, or project postmortem, is an assessment of project results, activities and processes in order to do the following:

-Recognize project achievements and acknowledge people’s contributions.
-Identify techniques and approaches that worked and devise steps to ensure they’re used again in the future.
-Identify techniques and approaches that didn’t work and devise steps to ensure that things are handled differently in the future (p 404).

While I was in Cleveland Schools we had to change how we taught.  A change had come and there was no time to be a resister.  The project scope was to begin to document students work in portfolios back in 2000.  The objective of the rollout of portfolios was to make teachers more accountable when teaching and to also be able to better inform the parents of their child’s progress. 

The deliverables for this project came from the district CEO who provided each school with 4” binders for each student.  As teachers we had to label the binders with students names; we had to have clearly labeled sections for students work to into and then develop a system for the students to add to their portfolios as well as the teacher adding evaluations and assessments. 

I found that the portfolios were an excellent communication tool to use with the parents because they could see actual progress or areas in their children’s folders.  As a teacher I no longer had to depend on giving subjective information to parents about their child.  I think that the portfolio provided the parents with an objective view of their students work.

I was proud of my work with the portfolios because the system worked once I learned how to invite the students to add some piece of work they wanted their parents to see and also once I learned to take time to add assessments and other types of work like stories the student wrote from the drafting stage to the rough draft to the edit and finished product.  The portfolios were invaluable to the student as well because they could see how much they had learned and how much they had grown in terms of processes they had done in terms of early in the year the work was nascent but with each semester they could see where they were actually learning and improving.

The most frustrating part of the portfolio introduction was learning how to stay organized and finding time in an already time crunched day to actually sit down and add work to the student’s binders.  The most gratifying part of the project was when I could show parents what their children had learned.  If I could wave a magic wand and change anything I would not because as a first time experience with building portfolios I think it went extremely well for me.

I think that the stakeholders were pleased with the work we did as teachers in order to maintain individual examples of students work in binders.  The principal and regional teams would come to visit the classrooms to see if we had implemented the portfolios and if we did then we did not have to worry about receiving a reprimand for not complying with the program.  Complaints from parents begin to decrease because now teachers had solid proof of what actually went on during their child’s day. 

Do I believe that the managers i.e. the CEO and the principal were successful in their efforts to create portfolios were successful; the answer is a resounding yes.  The deliverables which were the binders for the student work arrived on time, we provided with dividers for each class and I think the teleconference went well for the initial startup of a new process in tracking students’ progress.

References:

Greer, M. (2010).  The project management minimalist: Just enough pm to rock your projects! Laureate International Universities.
Portny,  S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, M. S., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M. and Kramer (2008). Project Management: Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling Projects. Wiley Pathways 2nd edition.  Wiley.