Less Well-known Benefits of Communication Management

Communication management is all about making sure project stakeholders understand the purpose, status, and value the project brings to the business. And it also delivers additional benefits that you don’t often hear about:

• Greater understanding of stakeholders. Sound communication strategies go both ways and provide excellent opportunities for the project team to understand stakeholder needs and perspectives. This helps create better deliverables today and can help increase the value future projects bring to the business.  In addition, stakeholders who feel understood by the project team are more confident about the current project – as well as in project management as a discipline.
• Increased project sales prowess. Half the battle for project managers can be selling the value of a project. Executing well-crafted communication plans generates ideas, recognizes business concerns, and identifies valuable business objectives to help define viable projects. 
• Provides a periodic “project perception management” tool. A foundational piece of a communication plan is the project status report. A status report can shape and manage stakeholder perceptions. Less-experienced project managers view this report as a way to share progress compared to a published plan, which, of course, it is. However, more experienced project managers include other information such as short success stories, opportunities that have arisen, and other news that can improve or reinforce a positive perception of the project and its value to the business. 
• Identifies vocabulary that gives you the greatest influence. The words stakeholders use to describe business problems and opportunities helps your outgoing project communication to be more meaningful. For example, the information technology lead for your project may draft reports using the phrase “data redundancy and operational integrity.” But if a stakeholder describes their concern with the phrase “data backup and restoration,” it is more effective to use the stakeholder’s terminology in your reports. That way, your communication will be understood and produce the desired reaction.

How have you pushed the benefits of communication within your projects? Share your tips with us in the comments!

For more about communication, check out Tatiana Kolovou and Brenda Bailey-Hughes’s course, Communication Foundations.

Coming Up

Don’t miss Bonnie’s first LinkedIn Office Hours session of 2022, Leadership is Job One for Project Managers, at 1pm MT, January 25, 2022. Bonnie and bestselling project management author Eric Verzuh will talk about how shifting your focus to project leadership has a direct impact on project value. Bring your project management questions to this session.