The Role and Importance of Communication in Project Management

Introduction

The successful management of every project from the initial stages to till it finishes properly requires certain key competencies and skills. There are so many skills such as time management, negotiation ability, leadership, risk management and so on. Perhaps the most prime skill required is – Communication for any project management under which underlies all the other skills. Without a strong ad effective communication, no project manager can do effective managing with their teams and coordinate effortlessly.

This assignment will explore the importance and role of effective communication in project management. There are two parts below defining separately the role of formal and informal communication and importance of formal and informal communication in project management along with given example of an organisation chosen as Tesco. In this assignment, there will be given a clear view of how to the managers of organisations can manage the communication process to bring about any project’s resolution to be successful.

Discussing the importance and role of formal and informal communication in effective project management using an example of a project.

Importance of Formal and Informal communication in an Effective Project Management.

As a part of the day to day organisational jobs, a project manager has to perform a list of variety of responsibilities and roles. These roles and responsibilities can only be performed at its best if the coordination between all the participants will be effortless and affluent. Communication is an important aspect in an effective project management because communication is that thing which every project managers needs to do for most of the time to coordinate with people effortlessly (Battistella et al. 2017). A project manager has to collect lots of information and then disseminate them across the whole team who all are involved within the project to coordinate the efforts given by them. Effective and efficient communication in project management is delivered by first considering the requirements of the audience who are intended to communicate with the managers. The manager has to put themselves in the shoes of the audience, understand the needs and then anticipate them to provide the desired result. Without a proper communication it becomes impossible for a project manager to identify the efforts which can be sometimes duplicated by multiple members involved in the project. Bushuiev, and Kozyr, (2020) opined that effective communication is one of the most essential ingredients in a successful project management. A proper establishment of communication in an organisation is if missed then there maybe resource misallocation issues, missed goals and milestones issues and realm of original goal intended. Fault in communication or miscommunication may result to screeching of the project to halt or can also be failed.

There are multiple types communication based on various types of perspectives that impacts the project and its management functions. Some of the types of communications based on perspectives are like internal and external communication comes under project perspectives, vertical, horizontal and diagonal communication under the organisational perspective, the channel perspective communication has two aspects verbal and non-verbal communication the final is the formality perspective which includes the formal and informal communication.

Formal Communication

Formal communication is an internal communication which is set by the organisations through the various kinds of pre defines channels. According to Chandrachooodan, and Radhika, (2020), this communication is basically conveyed starting from the top leaders such as project managers and floats downwards to the different departments to the other lower team members and employees. The formal communication is primarily backed up by the set of organisational procedures which all people follow. The formal communication is followed in its purest way and in a disciplined way then it can surely create and increase the efficiency of the organisation internally and externally. The channel through which the communication is passed on is a pre-determined channel of serve the communication which is meant to serve a proper, smooth and steam-lined way of transferring the communication which will travel from upward to downwards direction. As stated by Gillard, (2017), the formal communication channel is the method through which it becomes easy for the managers of projects to pass on and communicate the procedures, rules and regulations using which the project will be brought to success.

A formal communication notification is a method which is more favourable in situations when there is a need of documentation to be proved or disapproved. The manager establishes the communication with both the upper management and the lower team members to firmly and efficiently execute the process of project management (Zwikael et al. 2018). The audience of a formal communication are highly planned and highly produced. Type of formal communication methods are like press releases, reports, presentations and others. Generally every organisation follows the procedure of formal conversation to allocate the duties and responsibilities to the team members such as meetings, group discussions, conferences and many other methods.

Informal Communication

The informal communication also plays a bigger role than just talking and chatting which it has been understood. Lauren, (2018) said that the informal communication is as useful as formal since it is mostly been used to resolve conflicts and issues between the project team members and the management while handling the operations by the project manager. This kind of informal communication does not needed to be planned but it starts with social networking which includes methods like emails, ad-hoc discussions, phones and others. The informal communication starts to initiate when the formal communication ends. As an example resolving conflicts in project management can be considered. Verhoeven, (2021) stated that the informal communication creates solidarity and strengthens the members of the project team. However the most prime reason behind the informal communication being crucial in project management is that it gives chance to the employees to share their feedbacks and experiences about the project to their superiors or managers. Mandel, (2020) argumented that informal communication facilitates all the actions of the managerial interface and enables the flow of interactions to and from both sides effectively. The project team members when given opportunity to comment about their experiences about the organisation and its functioning informally, it becomes easy for the managers and higher authorities to improve more and meet the needed requirements. This action then leads to a successful project management and higher morale of employees. Examples of informal communication can be like touchbases, unplanned discussions and meetings, informal chats within the organisation, daily emails and etc.

However there are certain differences in between formal and informal communication such as formal is an official communication with proper structure and passed through formal channels like official emails and meeting whereas informal don’t include these and can be directed in any direction in a free flow (Sarhadi et al. 2018). Formal communication has secrecy and confidentiality in it but informal is an open and free communication. This is the reason why there are rumours spread through informal communication channels sometimes. The manager of an effective project management has the capability to understand that both the formal and informal communications are equally important for a successful project execution so neither of them should be ignored. Whether formal or informal, the project manager needs to understand that the communication should be purposeful and some useful thoughts can be conveyed to get the desired project results (Ul Musawir et al. 2017). Effective communication skills are the core foundation of any project management success, so it is important for the project managers to understand and identify the various types of communication competencies for a successful project communication.

Role of Formal and Informal communication in an Effective Project Management with example.

The role of both formal and informal communication is evident for an effective project management. There are various types of roles that are played by the communication skills in an organisation. The prime role of both the communications is to pass on the messages, instructions and information to the project team members whether formally or informally (Zwikael et al. 2018). There are different types of ways through which these communication processes can be channelized such as formal meetings, emails, casual discussions and cats, conferences and many others. In order to understand the role of formal and informal communication in project management, an organisation Tesco Plc. can be taken which is one of the leading retails business organisations having numerous customer range and wide spread business across the globe. Tesco Plc. is basically a British multinational supermarket serving groceries and all other general merchandises as retailer having headquartered in England’s Welwyn Garden City (tescometering.com, 2020). As measured by the gross revenues, Tesco Plc. is the third ranking supermarket store in the world. The project management have two main approaches, one is formal and the other is informal. The formal project management approach is basically consisted of the traditional project planning, scoping and benchmarking the management of the project (Ul Musawir et al. 2017). In this approach, the project managers have certifications in only the traditional project panning management process. On the other hand, the informal approach does not involve any such kinds of strict set up procedures or standards for managing the project. The informal project management approach mainly focuses on the open communication channels for a greater flow and flexibility (Zwikael et al. 2018). It does not adhere any old and traditional methodology; instead the project manager manages the project actions based on the situational requirements and at-the-moment needs.

Project management is that aspect of every organisation where the project managers are responsible for fully executing the project plan successfully holding all the team members together. Tesco’s management pans are not very much unique from the other organisations but it has something different which makes its every new project or venture a success. However sometimes they have seen failure also. In order to create a sustainable and robust business organisation, Tesco Plc. always sets out some rules named as critical success factors (CSFs) (tescometering.com, 2020). These are followed by every managerial and lower level employees of Tesco Plc. which are linked to all the levels of project management in their business. These factors are listed as:

Team working which says the managers as responsible for ensuring to create a positive relationship among the team members

Personal integrity which says to build respect and trust among the employees

Developing self and others which says that it is the responsibility of the managers to inspire and motivate himself/herself and others too for improvements (tescocontrols.com, 2020)

Managing performances which says that the performances of the project team members should be taken care by the managers of that particular project

Driving team spirit which says the project managers must drive the employees in tough situations also to achieve desired results (tescocontrols.com, 2020)

All these techniques are adopted by the project managers of Tesco Plc. to focus on the proper execution of the projects. Tesco Plc. has worked with many big companies as collaboration for various types of projects and developed and launched new products to the market. One of those collaborations was with InfoPros. InfoPros brought that specific opportunity to Tesco Plc. which it was wanting for year (Sarhadi et al. 2018). InfoPros has assigned Tesco Plc. a project that will comprise of team members which includes illustrators and editors, technical writers who will work under the direction of a project manager from InfoPros. This team became conversant with all the Tesco Plc.’s lexicon and documents library to access all the needed information for the project execution (tescocontrols.com, 2020).

After this collaboration when the project was completed, Tesco Plc. needed to launch that new product to the market, the project team went onsite where the assembly or disassembly will be going to take place. All the team members worked alongside each other with the engineers of Tesco to record the documentation of the project process (Battistella et al. 2017). They gathered all the necessary and relevant service and operational information and then created a digital record of the whole project procedure. The team after that along with the Tesco engineers used a two-draft process which will help in finalising the service manuals and the parts of the catalogues so that they can be quickly brought down to the field for working (Ul Musawir et al. 2017). After all these procedures, InfoPros also supported Tesco Plc.’s other third party businesses. Under these businesses, Tesco Plc. provided services and maintained the drilling- related equipment and products which are basically manufactured by the other companies in the market (tescometering.com, 2020). Similar to the manufacturing products of Tesco Plc. They also required some comprehensive service regarding manuals for all the products which they provided and supported in the market and customers. For all these services, Tesco Plc. depended upon InfoPros and made many other collaboration projects. InfoPros helped Tesco Plc. to develop and maintain the service manuals and provided parts of the catalogues (Zwikael et al. 2018).

This collaboration project is a good example of role of communication for an effective project management since in this project the managers were the most responsible persons to drive the team towards correct direction with affluent communication so that there will not occur any such issue which will create hindrance in the process (Battistella et al. 2017). A good and proper communication has always been helpful in project management just like in case of Tesco Plc. here. The InfoPros-Tesco Plc. partnership opened many new ways for Tesco to initiate new projects for delivering oil and gas industry solutions to the market (tescocontrols.com, 2020). This partnership projected support to its other clients for their documentation needs to be fulfilled. The Tesco Plc.-InfoPros collaboration project provided Tesco Plc. various other benefits such as creation of a dedicated documentation team to the company without any fixed cost which could be associated with the full time hiring process (Sarhadi et al. 2018). InfoPros partnership gave Tesco Plc. opportunity to achieve the goals which it set for the future development (tescocontrols.com, 2020). Both the approaches of the project management task have its pros and cons. In some cases the combination of both the approaches are adopted like in the Tesco Plc.-InfoPros collaboration project where sometimes formal communication method is adopted and sometimes informal as per the requirements for a better communication (tescometering.com, 2020).

Conclusion

The conclusion of this assignment states that communication is one of the most important aspects in completion of a project management efficiently and effectively. Communication can also be of many types based on different perspectives of the project. Some of the types of communications based on perspectives are like internal and external communication comes under project perspectives, vertical, horizontal and diagonal communication under the organisational perspective, the channel perspective communication has two aspects verbal and non-verbal communication the final is the formality perspective which includes the formal and informal communication. The formal and informal communication for an effective project management is made understood by giving the example of the InfoPros-Tesco Plc.’s collaboration project where both the combination of formal and informal communication and the combination of both the formal and informal project management approaches are used. This partnership projected support to its other clients for their documentation needs to be fulfilled. The Tesco Plc.-InfoPros collaboration project provided Tesco Plc. various other benefits such as creation of a dedicated documentation team to the company without any fixed cost which could be associated with the full time hiring process. Finally it can be concluded that a proper communication is a must for an effective project management.

Take a deeper dive into The Relationship between Frequency of Lying with our additional resources.

References

Battistella, C., Nonino, F. and Palombi, G., 2017. Unveiling the role of culture for effective project management. In ISPIM Conference Proceedings (pp. 1-13). The International Society for Professional Innovation Management (ISPIM).

Bushuiev, D. and Kozyr, B., 2020. Hybrid infrastructure project management methodologies. Innovative Technologies and Scientific Solutions for Industries, (1 (11)), pp.35-43.

Chandrachooodan, G. and Radhika, R., 2020. PROJECT MANAGEMENT METHODOLOGIES IN E-GOVERNANCE PROJECTS–A CONCEPTUAL REVIEW. Journal of Critical Reviews, 7(13), pp.1127-1132.

Gillard, S., 2017. The human element of project management. Contemporary Issues in Education Research (CIER), 10(3), pp.185-188.

Lauren, B., 2018. Communicating project management: A participatory rhetoric for development teams. Routledge.

Mandel, H., 2020. Project Management: The different Methodologies on how to manage Projects of private and public Institutions.

Sarhadi, M., Yousefi, S. and Zamani, A., 2018. Participative project management as a comprehensive response to postmodernism criticisms: The role of communication. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business.

Ul Musawir, A., Serra, C.E.M., Zwikael, O. and Ali, I., 2017. Project governance, benefit management, and project success: Towards a framework for supporting organizational strategy implementation. International Journal of Project Management, 35(8), pp.1658-1672.

Verhoeven, L., 2021. Effective project management around the world: On the management of cultural differences in international building projects.

Zwikael, O., Chih, Y.Y. and Meredith, J.R., 2018. Project benefit management: Setting effective target benefits. International Journal of Project Management, 36(4), pp.650-658.