Project Cycle Optimisation™
Step 3: Communimatics - Creating Fanatical Communication
Communication is, an effort to make the world smaller.
David Acker - Skill in Communication
As seen from our previous topics, Project Requirements and Goal-Alignment, effective communication plays a key role in the maintenance and progress of every project lifestyle.
However, it is an unfortunate truth that teams often get overly focussed on their day-to-day tasks at the expense of regular communication. By following a few, easy-to-follow guidelines you can open up new channels of dialogue scheduled perfectly to improve your momentum.
- Always remember - a software project is a human adventure. A large proportion of all major development issues & failures are (more often then not) due to the lack of clear and frequent dialogue between individual team members.
- Good communication relies on well-defined procedures with efficient techniques. If you don’t have them, write them. They should not be complex or onerous, but should rather encourage simple actions through the use of approaches, forms, templates and structures. Their purpose is to pass on relevant information a receiver needs, when the receiver needs it.
- Ensure that your project manager is a communications facilitator. They must have the skills and abilities to (a) identify preferred communications modes for the critical stakeholders, (b) assess the best means to enable these modes and (c) ensure the integrity of the process as the project continues.
- Consider your communication tools. English, by nature, can be ambiguous. Employing well established diagramming techniques (such as UML) can eradicate these ambiguities and increase the quality of team communication dramatically.
- Establish clear dialogue channels between all key members of your team. Without a reporting structure you will lose consistency and create a volume of “talk” that is unnecessary. Be sure that each sub-team has a spokesman.
- Hold regular meetings with key stakeholders to share the state of the project and help to steer it in the right direction. If something is wrong, learn about it now, not later.
- Always remember - the truth must prevail. Good decisions are made when they are based on accurate information, even if it’s bad news! Issues ignored now will have to be faced eventually.
- Involve everyone. Don’t isolate sub-teams by their functions. This is a huge mistake and will result in an unsatisfactory outcome. Communimatics is about successful interaction between all stakeholders and departments continually - commercial, technical, end-users, sales & marketing, etc.
- Make use of artefact templates. Unique routines and issues of functionality can often be better described through the use of case examples. If you have built something right in the past use it for an example now. This can really help staff to understand concepts more easily and eradicate the opportunity for misinterpretation.
- Always focus on the result. Many believe that the above actions are gratuitous or, at best, happen naturally. This is not the case. Applying a structured Communimatics framework will enable real benefits to take place, i.e. a permanent control over costs, functionality and expected delivery dates.
