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Lack Of Communication And Confusion In Project Management

2008/8/28 17:57:00 41890

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Mr. L was responsible for a large data warehouse project in the aviation field. During the first phase of the project, various problems emerged.

In the project, Mr. L did not establish effective links with stakeholders, so that they could not understand the progress of the project.

Even the project developers themselves do not have a clear understanding of the overall situation of the project, and only take part in their own work. They are indifferent to other work. Once the project is started, it is not until the end of the project that the product condition can be accurately known.

The whole development process is completely a black box mode. The members of the project team can not grasp the accurate progress and can not guarantee the quality of the project.

In the late stage of the project, it was discovered that the sales module development was too slow, and had to work overtime to rush to work. The quality of the project was not even assured of itself. A large number of BUG remained in this part, resulting in many hidden dangers. The workload of maintenance even exceeded that of the development, resulting in the excessive maintenance cost of the system.

Users complain a lot, and the maintenance staff is even more complaining.

When the project is completed, the information provided by the customer can not meet the requirements of making the report, and complain that the change has already notified the project team, but Mr. L has no idea as a project manager.

The developer describes the implementation method when designing the internal accounting module, but in order to save time, it just writes the design roughly, and then encodes it.

At the end of the coding, it was found that it was very different from what Mr. L understood, and it had to be reversed. Not only did the workload increase, but also the cost was overspent.

In the two phase of the project, the company began to adopt some development ideas of CMM, strengthen the management of demand and plan, and use the configuration management tool VSS to manage documents. The situation gradually improved, but there were still many problems in the early stage: many members of the project were perfunctory about the documents and thought they were just walking through the scene.

It is no accident that Mr. L encountered the phenomenon. If we analyze it slightly, we will find that when Mr. L's project team begins to quote the development thought of CMM, what is lacking is a communication mechanism between all levels of the project team, and strengthening communication management should be the only way to implement the successful project management.

Confusion stems from lack of communication.

In the process of implementing CMM, the resistance encountered by enterprises will come from all sides.

Enhancing positive propulsion and weakening reverse resistance are crucial to the success of process improvement.

To achieve this goal, the correct communication and coordination between different levels of enterprises play a decisive role, which requires effective communication management of projects.

Project manager is a bridge between project level and management level. It is the focal point of project communication.

It plays a connecting role in the implementation of CMM.

The implementation of CMM can not expect the whole staff to agree from the beginning, but the active participation of the project manager and effective communication with all levels is very necessary, which will greatly enhance the power of the whole enterprise to promote the implementation of CMM.

The internal driving force of CMM implementation mainly comes from two aspects: senior managers and project managers.

Senior managers are driven by resources and policies, and project managers are driven by practical problems.

The project manager should first understand the significance of process improvement and realize that process improvement work is for the project and is a reliable guarantee for the smooth progress of the project.

Instead of passively obeying the arrangement of senior managers and the planning of quality managers, this knowledge should be pmitted continuously to the project level through correct communication, and affect other aspects such as customers.

So that the project level will become the driving force to promote the implementation of CMM.

The process of CMM implementation is to break the old balance and establish a new balance process. During this period, the system will be relatively chaotic, and will have some negative effects on the running projects.

The most direct expression is that it will bring extra workload and generate a lot of pactional management work, which will easily cause the conflict of the relevant personnel.

Effective communication becomes more and more important.

Project managers should be keen to find the signs of developers in the process of project development, and control them in a timely manner in a formal way, and highlight the benefits of process improvement on projects and enterprises, so that members can see the hope, force them to persist first and avoid the intensification and spread of this emotion to the greatest extent.

As long as the real implementation process is improved, the members of the project team will experience the benefits of CMM in a subtle way.

As time goes on, developers will gradually support this process improvement when they see that the quality of the project is constantly improving and working conditions are becoming more standardized and stable.

For the project's SQA (software quality assurance) and SCM (Software Configuration Management) personnel, we need to strengthen the sense of cooperation, and constantly strengthen communication with the project team.

The quality department is the maker of the system, but that does not mean that they should be aloof from the project.

Developers are directly serving customers. Quality and configuration personnel are indirectly serving the customers indirectly, both for the success of projects and for the long-term development of enterprises.

The enhancement of cooperation consciousness is reflected in the in-depth understanding of the requirements of the project manager improvement process, and the quality work is carried out according to actual needs, striving to make breakthroughs in part and expand step by step.

We should adopt a flexible and diversified approach to close contact with developers, carry out quality publicity through effective channels, understand feedback and promote their work.

CMM process improvement needs constant success.

QA (quality assurance) members through continuous communication, bit by bit to show you the improvement effect of CMM, so that we recognize process improvement, reduce resistance.

Under the CMM environment, the purpose of project management is also to achieve the established project objectives.

In this process, it is generally believed that the plan must be detailed and meticulous, and the project can be successfully controlled when the project is implemented. This is actually the most basic condition for the success of the project.

According to statistics, there are more than 70% failed projects in the course of the project, not because the plan is not comprehensive, nor is it not in control, but because some resources of the project can not be used in time and fully.

And this is directly related to the negative communication.

In the process of management, the project manager must spend at least 75% of the time to coordinate and communicate with the stakeholders of the project, and get their understanding and support.

To accomplish this, the project is half successful.

Improving communication skills

Experts believe that the greatest threat to success is communication failure.

The three main factors contributing to the success of IT project are: active participation of users, explicit demand expression, and strong support from management.

All three elements depend on good communication skills.

On the one hand, it pays attention to "science" in effective communication. It consists of some basic skills, such as effective writing and expression, expressing self style as the guideline, insisting on a clear theme (that is, constantly emphasizing the core view of the information conveyed) and succinctly providing coordination information.

These basic skills, namely "science", help to form an impression of integrity and integrity of managers.

On the other hand, it is to improve the "art" in effective communication. It contains some profound and sometimes instinctive techniques, such as observing the listener's reaction, interpreting the emotion of the other party, understanding the truth, persuading strategy for different people, solving problems of the team by collective means and finding out the root cause of the problem.

These skills, namely "art", determine the degree of persuasions of managers.

The problems encountered by Mr. L may make many project managers helpless.

But with a little analysis and PMP like learning, we will be deeply aware that the problem lies not in planning and monitoring, but in communication. We must do everything we can to strengthen management in this area.

According to the requirements, the goal of communication management is to create, collect, send, store and process project information in a timely and appropriate manner. Standard project communication management includes communication plan, information pmission, implementation report, management ending and so on.

Communication plan is the top priority.

To improve the situation of the project, it is imperative to seek advice from stakeholders and formulate communication plans.

According to the requirements of communication management, a complete project management plan should include the following contents:

File preservation: in communication plan, we first define the way of information preservation, the right to read and write information, define the location of all kinds of project documents, auxiliary documents, and the corresponding reading and writing permissions.

In project implementation, VSS can be used to manage documents uniformly, and the corresponding directory structure is established.

This is used to collect and store different types of information for unified version management.

Communication list: storing the contact information of stakeholders.

Such as development members, SQA, SCM, customers, senior leaders, system support, consultant, administration department, etc.

Record their aircraft, cell phones, functions and so on, so as to be concise and clear.

Plus some special staff's tagging, such as explaining the domain that the consultants are good at.

All relevant personnel will be able to relate the personnel information to the chest through this list.

Work report: clear report of the project team members on project managers, project managers on the higher levels and related personnel work report, accurate time and form.

For example, the project manager's project can take the weekly report principle, that is, every week the project team members submit weekly progress reports, report on the progress of the week and the problems encountered. Every Monday morning, the project manager communicates with the business manager to complete the project weekly report, and the project group meeting is held at 1:30 pm. After the meeting, the project manager delivers the project weekly report to the senior manager, and the report is submitted at the end of each stage of the project.

All documents are submitted to VSS for unified management.

In case of emergency, the telephone must be communicated in time; in addition, all Mail must be replied to whether it is received or not.

Unified project file format: the use of uniform file format is part of project standardization management. Therefore, various file templates must be unified and corresponding guidelines should be provided.

For example, when a project is in the CMM environment, it can all be used by SPEG (software engineering process group) previously tailored to the CMM specification to make the revised template.

Communication plan maintenance person: make clear who will make amendments to the plan when it changes, and send it to relevant personnel.

The key to making communication plans is how to carry out all kinds of information pmission according to them.

It is very important and difficult to convey the information of project management to the corresponding personnel. What happens frequently is that the information sender feels that he has conveyed the information correctly, but actually the information has not been conveyed or wrongly understood.

Communication is two-way, and information must be received by the receiver.

All communication modes must have feedback mechanism.

For example, when communicating with Mail, the receiver must be asked to respond simply to "received" in order to respond.

After receiving the information, we must ensure that the understanding is correct.

A lot of information is conveyed, but it is misunderstood, resulting in a lot of wrangling.

In the communication management, the project manager requires two times to express the information on important notices and changes through Mail.

This expression is when the receiver confirms his understanding, and then refine or refer to it instead of retelling.

To put it plainly, it requires the receiver to explain what he understands.