Seven Habits of True Project Leaders: Habit #5
This series highlights the 7 habits that are highly ingrained in project leaders who are capable of consistently delivering project success. Our last post discussed the importance of administrivia.
Habit #5: Enables Airtight Communication
Every hiring manager emphasizes “communication skills,” but this generally refers to someone’s individual ability to speak well. It’s even more important to get the plan and infrastructure in place to enable communicating in the first place.
The right project manager will command strong communication up, down, and laterally. Project management requires an airtight process to make sure that changes are identified, acknowledged, and revised in a way that’s complementary to the original expectations.
A formal communication process is the foundation to this. Any gap in the following process will send things off the rails.
Nurture:
If an organization wants an accurate status of the reality of the project, no one can do it alone, regardless of talent. In order to nail Issue Management, for example, the project manager first needs to perform a Risk Assessment that highlights the potential issues. Then, the practitioners need to report the realized risks (i.e.: issues) to the project manager. From there, someone needs to send the issue further up the ladder to determine what recourse there is to resolve the issue, then send it back down to execute on the resolution. No project manager is prescient. They rely on a well-executed communication plan from all team members to have control of their projects.