Background

Some read­ers may well be won­der­ing why a whole site ded­ic­ated to inter­na­tional pro­ject man­age­ment com­mu­nic­a­tions, well below are hope­fully some answers.

PMI iden­ti­fies Com­mu­nic­a­tions as one of the 8 know­ledge areas, along with integ­ra­tion, scope, time, cost, qual­ity, human resources, risk and pro­cure­ment, and ded­ic­ates 30 pages of the Pro­ject Man­age­ment Body of Know­ledge (PMBOK) to dis­cuss­ing the way in which pro­ject com­mu­nic­a­tions should be ini­ti­ated, planned and repor­ted. It does a good job of describ­ing the pro­cess of estab­lish­ing, man­aging and clos­ing a pro­ject vari­ous com­mu­nic­a­tions channels.

Com­mu­nic­a­tions as a con­trib­utor to the rel­at­ive suc­cess or fail­ure of a pro­ject is dis­cussed in vir­tu­ally every Pro­ject Man­age­ment book, journal and art­icle, by both the experts and ama­teurs alike, it is cer­tainly a recog­nised facet of the profession.

There is a lot of inform­a­tion out there on the tools of com­mu­nic­a­tion, there are any num­ber of pieces of com­mu­nic­a­tion plan­ning soft­ware, ran­ging from the simple spread­sheets and lists, includ­ing my own very simplistic one, to some very com­plex and impress­ive stake­holder man­age­ment tools.

Com­mu­nic­a­tions issues are invari­ably lis­ted in the top two or three causes of pro­ject fail­ures, and while this is a pretty gen­eral state­ment to make in any sur­vey, I do believe it reflects a gen­eral tend­ency within pro­ject teams for the par­ti­cipants to focus more on the tech­nical issues of the pro­ject and neg­lect the non tech­nical tasks, dis­miss­ing them as “soft” issues, when they are often the most difficult.

There is, how­ever, little research or assembled inform­a­tion on the actual pro­cess of under­stand­ing and com­mu­nic­at­ing with other human beings in the con­text of pro­ject teams, inform­a­tion, that is, that is writ­ten from the per­spect­ive of how to talk to your fel­low humans, in fact, Com­mu­nic­a­tions reg­u­larly fea­tures as one of the least researched aspects of pro­ject man­age­ment, com­ing a very poor cousin to the research into plan­ning of sched­ule and cost, con­trol of change etc. which are all extremely import­ant fields in their own right.

So, I felt it was time for com­mu­nic­a­tion to get another voice as it were, and here we are.

To try to make the com­mu­nic­a­tions pro­cess more open, I have added a trans­la­tion plu­gin to the site, this plug in will allow read­ers to access the site in any of around 45 dif­fer­ent lan­guages, after all, we don’t all com­mu­nic­ate in the same lan­guage any more than we all live in the same place, and while the trans­la­tions may not be per­fect, hope­fully they are good enough that we can all under­stand them.