How Do You Know Your Project Communications Are Working?
Most projects measure communication by counting it. Bulletins issued, attendance at the monthly session, open rates on an email, a satisfaction score from a survey eleven people answered. Every one of those measures activity, and a project can score well on all of them while the people who needed to act on something did not.
Whether communication worked shows up in behaviour, and it can be measured without asking anybody a question. It takes about twenty minutes a quarter and three kinds of evidence.
Activity is not evidence
Two measures are worth dropping before anything gets added.
Attendance and open rates count exposure. Somebody who sat through a session and left with a different understanding from the one intended is recorded identically to somebody who acted on it correctly. On a project of any size, both of those people are inside the number.
Satisfaction surveys measure how people feel about the communication, which is worth knowing and is a different question. A bulletin can be well written, well liked and produce no action whatever, and a blunt phone call somebody resented can produce exactly the action needed. Both happen regularly.
Three kinds of evidence that count
Monitoring communications is a named process in the Eighth Edition, sitting at Section 2.5.2 among the rest of the stakeholder work, and what makes it usable is that the evidence is already being produced by the project.
Action evidence comes first and is the strongest. Of the things the project asked people to do last quarter, how many happened, on time, by the person asked, with no chase? A communication that required an action either produced it or did not, and counting is easy, because every one of those asks is sitting in somebody's sent items. A project running at half is publishing and then telephoning.
Surprise evidence comes second. Count the occasions when somebody was surprised by something the project had already communicated. Each one has a traceable cause: it never reached them, it reached them and was read differently, or it was understood and contained no request. Three surprises in a quarter from the same person is a routing problem. Three from three people about the same subject is a message problem.
Reach evidence comes third and is the dullest and most productive. Distribution lists decay. People leave, teams reorganise, a shared mailbox loses its owner, a personal address stops being read after somebody changes role. On most projects at least one important recipient has been receiving nothing for months, and nobody has checked, because the messages never bounced.
The floor that went in facing the wrong way
A facilities team was refurbishing two floors of an office building, with the furniture installation contracted separately from the building work. Four weeks before handover the client's workplace lead changed the desk layout: pods of six in place of rows, which moved where power and data had to come out of the floor.
The change was communicated properly. It went to the furniture contractor and the electrical subcontractor in the weekly package, it appeared on the revised drawings, and both firms attended the meeting where it was discussed. Nobody was careless.
The floor boxes went in to the revised drawing and the desks went in to the original one. The furniture contractor's fitting team worked from a set issued to them six weeks earlier, because that is what fitting teams work from, and the weekly package went to a project coordinator who had left the post three weeks before. What handover inspected was a floor of new desks with a power lead trailing across the carpet from each one to a box two metres away.
Both failures were findable in advance. A reach check would have shown a distribution list carrying somebody who had gone. An action check would have shown a change issued four weeks earlier with no confirmation from the party who had to act on it. Neither check was run, because communications on that project were measured by whether the package went out on Fridays, and it always did.
For a PMP® candidate, the distinction worth carrying is between a communications measure and a communications activity. A situation offering a bulletin schedule, an attendance figure or a survey score as evidence that stakeholders are informed is offering activity, and the question underneath is what any of it caused. An action, a surprise or a recipient is what to look for, because those three are where the evidence lives. Situations that present a convincing set of activity numbers are exactly the ones a structured PMP exam preparation course asks you to read carefully.
Start the surprise log. One line each time somebody is surprised by something that had been communicated: who, what, and which of the three failures it was. It takes seconds to write and a quarter of it is enough to show a pattern. Then, once, open the distribution list and check every name against the current organisation chart. That exercise takes fifteen minutes and usually finds two people who should not be on it and one who should.
Interested in going further?
A complete communications record and a project where nobody acted are a common pairing, and only one of the two turns up in a status report. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through situations where the evidence of effectiveness has to be found in what people did.
Whether communications are working is treated as a process in its own right in the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
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References
A132: The PMBOK 8 Stakeholders Performance Domain: What It Really Covers
A133: Stakeholder Management vs Stakeholder Engagement
A134: Power/Interest Grid vs Salience Model
A135: Stakeholder Power Is Not the Same as Engagement
A136: Why Hostile Stakeholders Still Need Engagement
PMP and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
