Like many project professionals I am of the view that Communication Management is one of the most important factors in the successful delivery of a Project. Both internal and external communications must be seamless. This means that project managers have to ensure that there are no communication barriers existing within the system. How visible is the project status to the team internally? Are the internal stakeholders informed about the project status? Who is ensuring that information flows seamlessly within the project team? Only a Project Manager can provide all these answers.

Here’s something I heard many times – Oh, I didn’t know there was a delay in delivery of a critical equipment! Or –  I thought this was already approved! Had no idea that the welders are not reported! And so on, you get the idea. So you have to ask: whose responsibility is it to inform (or keep others informed) about the actions and delays in the project? Is it the Project Manager? Of course! But let’s be realistic – it is not possible for a Project Manager to have all the information received and transmitted to the team, unless he has the right kind of tools to aid him.

What are the right kind of tools? To understand that let’s take this scenario: every Project Manager would like to, in an ideal world, be assured that the right people were executing every part of every job. Controlling and managing the availability of men, materials and machinery in a proper way can ensure the successful completion of the job and to that end the project manager needs to ensure that these are available in the right mix at the right time for executing the job, and in order to optimise the project cost and schedule. So, the right kind of tool is the one that will help the Project Manager communicate the plans and update the actuals and predict the future with minimal manual intervention. 

The right tool will also help in communicating about delays, hold ups and other issues to the right persons at the right time, instead of everybody searching for the information all over the place. This software should also act as a self-communicating device – rather than him having to rely on anyone pushing the information to him – almost like a kind of self-service to the project.

In other words the Project Manager and Project Owners  should spend their energy and time on areas where issues are going out of control and immediate intervention is needed rather than on chasing down every detail and thereby losing focus on the truly important points which are driving the project.

Obviously, this means that the software has to be able to communicate by itself ie be self-driven rather than manually-driven. The software needs to be able to – in a sense – update itself rather than wait someone to follow up to drive the project team to manually make the updates. This way the Project Manager will be able to decide on what action to take and when to act rather than searching for data he needs to analyse before making the decision. If he had this data in hand when needed, he would  be empowered to decide on the course of action to bring the project back on track.

Decisions made by the Project Management Team are based on the project information available on hand, which means that if the software system they use is capable of feeding accurate information at the right time to the right people (stakeholders), there would be a scenario where no decision got delayed because of a lack of communication from the project teams. Again, this is possible only if the software systems utilised by the Project Manager are able to provide the latest project information to the team, rather than waiting for a periodic update from the system.

In short, we are looking for a system which stands on its own and pushes data/information to the right people rather than waiting for the people to pull it – a system that is able to automatically (ie is pre-configured to) drive the Project team to take action rather than be dependent on the discretion of team members.