Communication

PPM provides you with the workflows for communication to ensure that the right messages are sent, received, and understood by the right people in your projects. PPM covers planning, managing and monitoring processes for communication and escalation processes for your projects.

Plan Communication

PPM helps you clearly outline how you will manage communications across their projects. This is done by creating a project communication management plan. When creating a plan, the system guides you through the following steps:

• Decide your objectives: What will be the purpose of your communication? You may use some communication tools for awareness, such as a status report. Others may require action, such as requiring a sponsor to authorize spending or a customer to approve project testing.
• Determine your audience: Who are the stakeholders in this project? You should make an extensive list of everyone involved. Consider anyone impacted by the project or who influences its success. This list should include team members, sponsors, customers, and other interested parties.
• Write your message: What will the message be for each type of communication? This is the actual content that will be shared. Key components to be communicated include scope, schedule, budget, objectives, risks, and deliverables.
• Choose your channel: How will the message be delivered? Will it be a formal report emailed out to all stakeholders? Or will it be an informal verbal debrief during a team meeting?
• Set a timeline: When will you deliver your message? Do your stakeholders require weekly or monthly reports? Is there a deadline to meet? Consider varying time zones and employee schedules here.

Your project communication management plan should be detailed enough to lay out why you’re sending a message, who you’re sending it to, what specific information will be sent, how you’re going to send it, and when.

Manage Communication

In terms of managing communication, PPM provides you with automated workflows for the following:

• Collect and analyze activity/deliverable/milestone planned vs. delivered
• Create alert messages for both approaching and missing deadlines
• Transmit or distribute communication messages to the appropriate stakeholders
• Store any activity-related communication reports, files, or documents according to the WBS structure
• Allow retrieval of any stored communications

Monitor Communication

PPM helps you monitor and control project communications throughout the lifecycle of your project. This includes the confirmation of the following:

• Communication went out as planned
• They were received by the proper stakeholders
• Messages were understood
• Any relevant feedback was provided to the appropriate stakeholders

Escalation

PPM also supports the escalation mechanism for any project stakeholders to highlight an issue at hand to a higher authority. For example, if a certain project stakeholder is not willing to or is not able to do a certain activity he or she is responsible for, it is necessary to escalate the issue to the superior for resolution.

Risks or issues related to project objectives, resource and inter-group conflicts, ambiguous roles and responsibilities, scope disagreements, third-party dependencies are some known situations calling for escalations. Such issues require higher level intervention because many times the authority, decision making, resources or effort required to resolve them are beyond a project manager’s horizon. At times, the project manager may want to involve higher authorities for information-only escalations to keep them abreast of potential issues in the project.