5 Tips for Improving Project Communications

Project managers have several responsibilities, one of which is the need to communicate effectively. As project managers meet with teams, communication skills become increasingly important. The following tips will help project managers communicate more effectively when meeting with project team members.

1. Clearly Define Meeting Objectives

The first step for improving a project manager's communication with teams is to define clear meeting objectives. Are you trying to solve a problem, make a decision, brainstorm a new idea, or provide a project update? The objective for the meeting should determine the setting and tone for the meeting (Nine ways to make your meeting more effective, 2003).

7 Habits of Brilliant Project Managers

By Duncan Brodie

Project management is a tough role. You often find yourself being pulled between keeping users, subordinates, team members and senior people happy. Given these demands, what do the best project managers do that makes them stand out from the crowd?

1. Focus on Solutions

Problem solving and breaking through constraints is an essential part of managing projects. Those that excel as project managers have a mindset where they focus on finding solutions to problems. They keep asking themselves how they can overcome whatever barriers arise.

2. Participative and Decisive

All the best project managers understand the need to communicate and consult. They also know that lots of talking and procrastination achieves nothing. Finding the right balance between consulting, deciding and acting is what separates the best from the rest.

The Project Manager is like an Intel Processor

By Jim De Piante

The Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition processor is one heck of a piece of technology. It has six physical cores. Its base clock speed is 3.33 GHz. It supports three channels of DDR3-1066 memory and has 12 threads for your application to work with. It also has 12MB of L3 cache shared across all six cores.

I'm not sure I understand all of that but here's something I understand perfectly: To become the proud owner of one of these will set me back US$999. I also understand perfectly that if I were to drop US$999 for one, I will have wasted my money.

That processor, out of the box, is utterly useless.

Kung Fu Project Management

By Kerry Wills.

Growing up in New York during the 1980s, I enjoyed watching what was called “The Sunday Afternoon Kung Fu Theater” on television. This meant four hours straight of Kung Fu movies, dueling techniques, avenging deaths, dubbed voice-overs, and wonderful noises for punches and kicks. There was also the additional two hours after the movies ended when my brother and I would re-enact the movies on each other (and destroy our house in the process). This article ponders these similarities of these movies to project management to see if it can help Project Managers attain their “black belt” in managing projects.

For those people reading this article who are not familiar with this genre of movies, I will give a brief overview. Each movie was about two hours long and they all had very distinct characteristics:

Each had a similar story in that a martial arts student has some wrong done to them (e.g. the killing of a master/brother/father, ransacking of the town/temple by thugs, etc.), then they go away to the mountains to train in some particular technique and would come back and avenge the wrong done to them.

The techniques that each student practiced made them super-human by having the ability to fly, smash walls with their fists, take arrows without being hurt, climb trees without using their hands, etc. (Do you begin to see the similarities with Project Managers yet?).