Communication is a crucial aspect that heavily contributes to the success of a project. People involved and the situations decide which communication tools should be utilized, but the intention of using them is the same. That is to ensure effective and efficient communication and to assist the team to make better decisions. Decisions need open lines of communication to allow information among teams. It is important to use the right tool for the right type of communication.
In this article, we are going to point out the importance of certain communication tools for the project management process.
1. Project Calendar
This is a pivotal document to have in project management. The project calendar is exactly what you think it is. It is a calendar in which you chronicle the project’s main events such as important milestones, meetings, etc.
2. Discussion Board
What a discussion board does is allow a distributed team to have shared, asynchronous, archived talks about the project. Having conversations is a better method than emails because everyone on the project may contribute without needing to be explicitly included. And when you have a discussion board, even the newbies can view talks that took place before they joined. This is also an excellent place to capture and summarize an in-person conversation so that it may be stored.
3. Weekly Status Reports
Written communication is an excellent approach to review projects and document progress regularly. You can create weekly status reports and distribute them to all project participants to communicate with them about project progress and to highlight the project risks in a formal way.
4. Work Breakdown Structure
The work breakdown structure is one of the most significant project communication tools. If you are a project manager, you must guarantee that your projects have one and that it is communicated regularly. This is perhaps the best graphic tool for documenting the project scope. If a project job is not on the WBS, it means that it is not in scope for the project.
5. Project Newsletter
Although the Project Newsletter seems to be not that critical in project management, we feel that it’s quite important. The advantage of the project newsletter is that it combines project status and personnel information into a single tool. Most importantly this is one of the few communication tools that allows you to combine business and personal stuff into a single document. We suggest you start utilizing this tool for your projects without underestimating its potential.
6. Role Report Matrix
This tool is what you use to determine who is getting what report ( newsletters, status reports, etc.) and when. The major benefit of this is that it helps the team to communicate more effectively on their projects.
7. Iteration Planning Meetings
Usually, it is better to meet with the complete team once a week. One-on-one meetings are highly recommended, but if the circumstances do not allow that, you could opt for video conferences. In these meetings, you can plan the work for the coming week and report on project progress. These meetings are even better as the team gets to know each other much better.
These are significant communication tools and their importance in project management. By going through it, you can finalize what fits your project and what isn’t. Also, if you are interested in getting to know what the key benefits of project management applications are, you can check this link out.
Also Read: 7 Key Benefits of Project Management Applications
