Pawel Brodzinski hosts a blog on software development lifecycle and poses this question: “Is over-communication a problem in project management?” Some interesting initial comments have come in via his blog and twitter.
As you may be aware, Merlin provides the Element concept to attach additional information for any project, along with project report templates. The art of communication is the heart and soul of Pawel’s post, however — it is largely how you communicate information that you generate and manage using your PM tools, including how and when do you communicate this information, that helps make the truly effective PMs stand out. This goes way behind simple bits and bytes.
My own PM experience underscores the challenge that capturing project management information is just half the battle. Look at most web-based services today, and they really focus mostly on communication rather than formal definitions and processes relating to PM (if you get those auto-generated email alerts when an activity is assigned to you, you know what I’m talking about).
Ensuring that project information is properly consumed, understood, and acted upon by project team members accordingly is part of the “control” and risk mitigation actions necessary to keep a project from becoming derailed. Most “lessons learned” I’ve encountered have definitely fallen on the side of under-communicating rather than over-communicating, or not sharing the same ‘definition’ when it comes to assessing effort on tasks.
What has been your experience, and for our Merlin users, how do you help manage the communication of information that you manage with Merlin?
I’ve been on a project for a few months where I have had to adhere to some client requirements for tools that I use to manage the work my team does. We’ve got physical information radiators posted on the walls, files posted on the server in different folders all across their enterprise collaboration tool, files in email, etc. I maintain a host of different documents on a weekly basis, all stored in different places and all I keep thinking is how much I can’t wait to get back to being able to store all of it in the same place with the elements in Merlin. What I’ve had to do for the past few months has been far less than efficient. It’s hard to go back once you’ve started with a better solution.