IT 301 Unit 7 Seminar Option 2

Unit 7 included an overview of communications management and why communication is important for a project manager. Constant communication is important and topics that need to be communicated include, performance reports, deliverable status, schedule, cost, and scope progress and anything that stakeholders deem important. For this reason, a communication plan is critical to ensure all of the information flows constantly and to the correct people. There are two major factors to successful communications management; developing appropriate communications plans, and executing these plans. Issues can occur if stakeholders are informed of status updates or problems with the project before the project or functional managers are informed, this is why monitoring and managing communication according to the plan is critical. The communications plan should be used to update the stakeholder engagement plan, the project schedule and the stakeholder register. Factors to consider when choosing communication technologies are; urgency, availability, ease of use, project environment, and sensitivity of the information. If information is projected by an NDA or classified it cannot be discussed on the same types of technologies that open-source information could be. Types of communication methods include, interactive such as a phone call or message, push communications like emails letters or memos, and pull communications which include web portals and lessons learned databases. The main goal of managing communications is to achieve effective and efficient communications. There are two fundamental reports and they are project reports and work performance reports. Project reports are ad hoc, relevant reports while work performance reports are the official status report of the project.

Finally, we discussed this week’s assignment which is not based on the ongoing class project. The assignment will include a communication matrix and a templated communication plan.