Breaking down the communication process

Communication is the transmitting of information from a sender to a receiver. Whenever you communicate, during the life of a project or at any other time, your goal is to ensure that the right person correctly receives your intended message in a timely manner.

The process of transmitting information includes the following components:

• Message: The thoughts or ideas being transmitted.
• Sender: The person transmitting the message.
• Encoded message: The message translated into a language understandable to others. (This language may consist of words, pictures, or actions.)
• Medium: The method used to convey the message. (The different mediums are described in detail in the later section “Choosing the Appropriate Medium for Project Communication.”)
• Noise: Anything that hinders successfully transmitting the message. (Noise may include preconceived notions, biases, difficulty with the language used, personal feelings, nonverbal cues, and emotions.)
• Receiver: The person getting the message.
• Decoded message: The message translated back into thoughts or ideas.

Depending on the nature of a particular communication, any or all of these elements can affect the chances that the sender receives the message as intended.

Distinguishing one-way and two-way communication

Certain types of communication are more effective for transmitting particular types of information. The two main types are

• One-way communication: Going from the sender to the receiver with no opportunity for clarification or confirmation that the receiver received and correctly understood the intended message. This type of communication can be effective for presenting facts, confirming actions, and sharing messages that have little chance of being misinterpreted.

  One-way communications are either push or pull:

  • Push: Proactively distributed to particular people; examples include memos, reports, letters, faxes, and emails.
  • Pull: Available to people who must access the communications themselves; examples include Internet and intranet sites, knowledge repositories, and bulletin boards.
• Two-way communication: Going from the sender to the receiver and from the receiver back to the sender to help ensure that the intended audience received and correctly interpreted the message. Examples include face-to-face discussions, phone calls, in-person group meetings, interactive teleconferences, and online instant messaging. Two-way communication is effective for ensuring that more complex content is correctly received and for conveying the sender’s beliefs and feelings about the message.

Can you hear me? Listening actively

The one skill that most strongly influences the quality of your communications is your ability to listen actively. Although you can assume that the information contained in a message and the format in which it’s presented affect how well that message is received, you can find out whether the recipient received the message as you intended by listening carefully to the recipient’s reactions.

Active listening is exploring and discussing a message that’s being sent to help ensure that the message is understood as intended. If you’re sending a message, you should encourage your intended recipient to use active listening techniques to help ensure that she correctly understands your message. If you’re receiving a message, you should use these techniques to verify to yourself that you have correctly received the intended message.

Because listening to and observing your recipient’s response to a message you sent her involves information flowing first from you to the recipient and then from the recipient back to you, active listening is, by definition, a form of two-way communication.

Active listening techniques include the following:

• Visualizing: Forming a mental picture of the content of a message. Forming this picture gives the receiver the opportunity to identify pieces of the message that may be missing or misunderstood, as well as to seek additional information that may improve the overall understanding of the original message.

  Consider that you’ve been asked to redesign the layout of your group’s offices to create a more open environment that will encourage people to feel more relaxed and to engage in more informal working group discussions. To help clarify what’s expected, you may try to visualize how the office environment will look and how people will behave after the changes in the layout are made. In particular, you may think about the following:

  • Whether you’ll have to use the existing furnishings or you’ll be able to buy new ones
  • Where people might hold informal meetings
  • How much soundproofing partitions of differing heights will provide

  As you try to visualize these different parts of the new office layout, you realize that the following aspects aren’t quite clear to you:

  • Will window offices have couches or just chairs?
  • How many people should be able to sit comfortably in an office?
  • Should you install white noise machines?

  As you talk with people to find answers to your questions, you get a better idea of what your boss does and doesn’t want.

• Paraphrasing: Explaining the message and its implications, as the receiver understands them, back to the sender in different words than the original message. To be most effective, the receiver should repeat the message in her own words to give the sender the best chance of identifying any misinterpretations.

  Consider that your boss asks you to prepare a report of your company’s recent sales activity by the end of the week. Many aspects of this request are unclear, such as the time period the report should cover, the specific time by when the report must be finished, the format in which you should prepare the report, and so forth. To clarify these items, you can paraphrase the request back to your boss as follows:

  “I’d like to confirm that you’re asking me to prepare for you a PowerPoint presentation on the company’s total gross and net sales of products a, b, and c for the period from January 1 to March 31 of this year and that you’d like me to have it for you by this coming Friday at 5:00 p.m.”

• Checking inferences: Clarifying assumptions and interpretations that the receiver makes about the message received.

  Consider the previous example in which your boss asks you to redesign the layout of your group’s offices. As you start to calculate the numbers of desks and chairs you’ll need in the new arrangement, you realize you’re assuming that the group will have the same number of people now and after the move. Instead of making this assumption, you can check with your boss to find out how many people he would like you to plan for as you design the new layout.

Active listening is particularly useful in situations that are emotionally charged, situations in which understanding is critical, situations in which consensus and clarity are desired in resolving conflict, and situations in which trust is sought.

Just the facts: Written reports

Unlike informal oral communication, written reports enable you to present factual data efficiently, choose your words carefully to minimize misunderstandings, provide a historical record of the information you share, and share the same message with a wide audience.

Although written reports have quite a few benefits, they also have some drawbacks that you need to consider:

• They don’t allow your audience to ask questions to clarify the content, meaning, or implication of your message.
• With written reports, you can’t verify that your audience received and interpreted your message as you intended.
• They don’t enable you to pick up nonverbal signals that suggest your audience’s reactions to the message.
• They don’t support interactive discussion and brainstorming about your message.
• You may never know whether your audience reads the report!

Keep the following pointers in mind to improve the chances that people read and understand your written reports (see the later section “Preparing a Written Project-Progress Report” for specifics on writing this special type of communication):

• Prepare regularly scheduled reports in a standard format. This consistency helps your audience find specific types of information quickly.
• Stay focused. Preparing several short reports to address different topics is better than combining several topics into one long report. People are more likely to pick up the important information about each topic.
• Minimize the use of technical jargon and acronyms. If people are unfamiliar with the language in your report, they’ll miss at least some of your messages.
• Use written reports to share facts, and be sure to identify a person or people to contact for clarification or further discussion of any information in the reports. Written reports present hard data with a minimum of subjective interpretation, and they provide a useful, permanent reference. A contact person can address any questions a recipient has about the information or the reasons for sharing it.
• Clearly describe any actions you want people to take based on information in the report. The more specifically you explain what you want people to do, the more likely they are to do it.
• Use different approaches to emphasize key information. For example, print key sections in a different color or on colored paper, or mention particularly relevant or important sections in a cover memo. This additional effort increases the chances that your audience will see the report and read it.

• After you send your report, discuss one or two key points that you addressed in it with people who received it. These follow-up conversations can quickly tell you whether your recipients have read your report.

  When you come across people who clearly haven’t read your report, in addition to following the other suggestions in this section, explain to them the specific parts of the document that are most important for them to review and why. Then tell them that you’d like to set up a follow-up meeting with them to discuss any questions or issues they may have regarding the information contained in those parts of the document.

• Keep your reports to one page, if possible. If you can’t fit your report on one page, include a short summary (one page or less) at the beginning of the report (check out the nearby sidebar “Keep it short — and that means you!”).

Move it along: Meetings that work

Few words elicit the same reactions of anger and frustration that the word meeting can provoke. People consider meetings to be everything from the last vestige of interpersonal contact in an increasingly technical society to the biggest time waster in business today.

You’ve probably been in meetings where you wanted to bang your head against the wall. Ever been to a meeting that didn’t start on time? How about a meeting that didn’t have an agenda or didn’t stick to the agenda it did have? Or how about a meeting at which people discussed issues you thought were resolved at a previous meeting?

Meetings don’t have to be painful experiences. If you plan and manage them well, meetings can be effective forms of communication. They can help you find out about other team members’ backgrounds, experiences, and styles; stimulate brainstorming, problem analysis, and decision-making; and provide a forum to explore the reasons for and interpretations of a message.

You can improve your meetings by using the suggestions in the following sections. (In addition, check out the later section “Holding Key Project Meetings” for tips on planning different types of meetings.)

Making a list and checking it twice

A project-progress report is a convenient way to keep key audiences involved in your project and informed of their responsibilities. Decide who should get regularly scheduled project-progress reports by answering the following questions:

• Who needs to know about your project?
• Who wants to know about your project?
• Whom do you want to know about your project?

At a minimum, consider providing project-progress reports to your supervisor, upper management, the client or customer, project team members, and other people who are helping you on the project, as well as to people who are interested in or who will be affected by the project’s results.

Knowing what’s hot (and what’s not) in your report

Preparing the project-progress report gives you an opportunity to step back and review all aspects of your project so you can recognize accomplishments and identify situations that may require your early intervention. Be sure to include some or all of the following information in your project-progress report for each performance period:

• Performance highlights: Always begin your report with a summary of project highlights, such as “The planned upper-management review was successfully conducted on schedule” or “Our client Mary Fisher approved our training outline according to schedule.” (Just remember to keep it to one page!)
• Performance details: Describe the activities, outcomes, milestones, labor hours, and resource expenditures in detail. For consistency, identify each activity by its work breakdown structure (WBS) code (see Chapter 4 in this minibook for details).
• Problems and issues: Highlight special issues or problems that you encountered during the period and propose any necessary corrective actions.
• Approved changes to the plan: Report all approved changes to the existing project plan.
• Risk-management status: Update your project risk assessment by reporting on changes in project assumptions, the likelihood of these updated assumptions occurring, and the effect of those updated assumptions on existing project plans.
• Plans for the next period: Summarize major work and accomplishments that you have planned for the next performance period.

Figure 5-1 contains an example of a project-progress report format. Although you can expand each section of information, depending on the nature of your project, remember that the longer the report is, the less likely your intended audience is to read and understand it.

Earning a Pulitzer, or at least writing an interesting report

When you write your project-progress report, make sure it’s interesting and tells the appropriate people what they need to know. After all, you don’t want your report to end up as a birdcage liner. Use the following tips to improve the quality of each of your project-progress reports:

• Tailor your reports to the interests and needs of your audiences. Provide only the information that your audience wants and needs. If necessary, prepare separate reports for different audiences. (See Chapter 2 of this minibook for more on defining your project’s audiences.)
• If you’re preparing different progress reports for different audiences, prepare the most detailed one first and extract information from that report to produce the others. This approach ensures consistency among the reports and reduces the likelihood that you’ll perform the same work more than once.
• Produce a project-progress report at least once a month, no matter what your audience requests. Monitoring and sharing information about project progress less often than once per month significantly increases the chances of major damage resulting from an unidentified problem.

• Make sure that all product, schedule, and resource information in your report is for the same time period. Accomplishing this may not be easy if you depend on different organization systems for your raw performance data.

  If you track project schedule performance on a system that you maintain yourself, you may be able to produce a status report by the end of the first week after the performance period. However, your organization’s financial system, which you use to track project expenditures, may not generate performance reports for the same period until a month later.

  Address this issue in your project’s start-up phase. Determine your sources for status data, the dates your updated data is available from each source, and the time periods that the data applies to. Then schedule your combined analysis and reporting so that all data describes the same time period.

• Always compare actual performance with respect to the performance plan. Presenting the information in this format highlights issues that you need to address.
• Include no surprises. If an element requires prompt action during the performance period (if, say, a key person unexpectedly leaves the project team), immediately tell all the people involved and work to address the problem. However, be sure to mention the occurrence and any corrective actions in the progress report to provide a written record.
• Use your regularly scheduled team meetings to discuss issues and problems that you raise in the project-progress report. Discuss any questions people have about the information in the project-progress report. (However, don’t read verbatim to people from the written report they’ve already received — and, you hope, read!)

Regularly scheduled team meetings

Regularly scheduled team meetings give members an opportunity to share progress and issues and to sustain productive and trusting interpersonal relationships. These meetings also provide an opportunity to reaffirm the project’s focus and to keep team members abreast of activities within and outside the project that affect their work and the project’s ultimate success. Recognizing that most people work on several projects at the same time, these meetings can reinforce the team’s identity and working relationships.

Consult with team members to develop a meeting schedule that’s convenient for as many people as possible. If some people can’t attend in person, try to have them participate in a conference call.

In addition to following the suggestions for productive meetings in the section “Move it along: Meetings that work,” observe the following guidelines when planning and conducting regular team meetings:

• Even though your team meetings are held regularly, before each meeting, prepare a specific agenda, distribute it beforehand, and solicit comments and suggestions.
• Before the meeting, distribute the project-progress report for the most recent performance period (take a look at the previous section, “Preparing a Written Project-Progress Report,” for details on this report).
• Distribute any other background information related to topics on the agenda before the meeting.
• Limit discussions that require more in-depth consideration; deal with them in other forums.
• Start on time and end on time.
• Prepare and distribute brief minutes of the meeting within 24 hours after its end.

Ad hoc team meetings

Hold ad hoc team meetings to address specific issues that arise during your project. An ad hoc meeting may involve some or all of your team’s members, depending on the topic. Because issues often arise unexpectedly, do the following as you plan an ad hoc meeting:

• Clarify the issue and what you hope to achieve at your meeting.
• Identify and invite all people who may be interested in, affected by, or working on the issue.
• Clearly explain the meeting’s purpose to all meeting invitees.
• Carefully document all action items that the attendees develop at the meeting, and assign responsibility for their completion.
• Share the results of an ad hoc meeting with all team members who may be affected by the results, who have an interest in them, and/or whose support you need to implement them.

Upper-management progress reviews

An upper-management progress review is a meeting that a senior manager usually presides over, a project manager runs, and team members and representatives of all functional areas attend. This review gives you the chance to tell upper management about your project’s status, its major accomplishments, and any issues that require their help. The review is also an opportunity for you to note ways to keep the project in line with major organization initiatives.

Take every opportunity to help upper management remember why your project is important to them. They may have approved your project only months ago, but chances are your project is now just one of many activities in your busy organization.

Get the most out of your upper-management progress review by observing the following tips:

• Identify the interests of your audience and explain how your project is meeting those interests.
• Keep your presentation short; choose a few key messages and emphasize them.
• Highlight key information but be prepared to go into more detail on issues if anyone asks you to do so.
• Use both text and graphics to convey important information.
• Allow time for questions.
• Present updated information on project risks, and explain how you’re addressing them.
• Distribute a brief handout at the meeting that summarizes the key points of your presentation.
• After the meeting, distribute notes that highlight issues raised and actions that you agreed on during the review.