Question

Case Study: Project Communications Management: Best Practices in Practice As part of a large IT systems integration project for the State of California, I witnessed the Project Management Office (PMO) do an excellent job of ensuring that the project stakeholders were properly informed of the project’s progress, outstanding issues, risks, and change requests. Information was gathered from multiple sources (for example, Project Schedule, Issue and Risk Repositories, Testing Tool Data Metrics, Change Request Log, and so on) and compiled into a comprehensive weekly status report that was shared with the stakeholders. In addition, detailed risk and issue status reports were prepared and shared in the weekly risk and issue management meetings. Also, the overall project performance status was communicated to the control agencies (for example, California Department of Technology, Department of Finance, and so on) via a monthly Project Status Report (aka PSR) containing a variety of performance tracking metrics. All questions were responded to, and all ambiguities were clarified in a timely manner to ensure that the information was clearly understood by the recipients as intended and everyone was on the same page. The project director was a strong proponent of information quality who took a keen interest in monitoring the quality of the content and delivery of the status reports and suggested improvements when necessary. Case Study Questions 1. What project communications best practices did the project practice? 2. How was the project performance status communicated to the control agencies? 3. What role did the project director play in enhancing the project communications management? 4. What are the lessons learned from this case?

Answer 1

Question #1: What project communications best practices did the project practice?

Keeping all the stakeholders on the same page by communicating project status or issues in the form of various reports is one of the best practice that the given project followed. It helped in collective and transparent decision making thus improving the chances of success of the project.

Question #2: How was the project performance status communicated to the control agencies?

It is very important to keep the key control agencies such as Department of Finance or Department of Technology well informed about the project status. In the given project the overall performance status was communicated to these control agencies via a Monthly Project Status Report (PSR). This report included key identified project performance tracking metrics.

Question #3: What role did the project director play in enhancing the project communications management?

The project director acted as executive sponsor of the project communications and took a keen interest in monitoring the quality of content and maintaining the timelines for delivery of reports. Involvement of Project Director in project communications made this initiative top driven and this ensured maximum compliance with the quality and delivery of the reports.

Question #4: What are the lessons learned from this case?

Key lessons learned from this case are:

• Proper communications about a project's status or issues to all the stakeholders is very important and one of the key lever to ensure the success of a project.
• Top driven initiatives are less likely to fail in a project or a company.
• Trust among the stakeholders should always be maintained, which helps the project to sail through rough tides. And, keeping everyone in the loop is an important tool to develop and maintain trust.