Category: Professional Development

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Five Vital Skills for Project Managers – Communication

Projects come in all shapes and sizes.  You might be managing a long term implementation or organising an event alongside your everyday work. Either way, communication is vital for the project’s success. In this blog, we will look at the first of five vital skills for project managers – communication.

A third of projects fail due to a breakdown in communication, which project managers can easily avoid.

Five Vital Skills for Project Managers – Communication
Communication
Why is communication so important?

Project Managers need to gather and share large quantities of information to co-ordinate the efforts of all involved. Dealing with all the details, dependencies, decisions, and approvals is impossible without consistent and timely communication.

Effective communication keeps conflict and confusion from slowing a project down. It ensures that key players are aligned on project goals and know what is expected of them. Team meetings will also run more smoothly as people will come prepared with the required information. Furthermore, it helps build team-wide trust so that everyone works together better from project start to finish.

How to keep track of it all

A simple but practical communication plan has clear guidelines . These include sharing information and recording what needs to be communicated. Everyone involved in the project will then know what to expect. Hence, they will be able to communicate with each other effectively and efficiently. Furthermore, It is essential that any changes or challenges that may affect time, budget or deliverables are communicated in a timely way.

Taking advantage of technology will help you communicate more effectively. This will help you recognise and remove barriers to communication.

A good Project Manager will build relationships that help projects move along smoothly. To do this, he or she needs to actively listen to the team and ask the right questions. Doing this, they will really understand what is happening. By being available, open to discussion and willing to adapt, they will set a tone of positive collaboration and communication. Projects will be more successful as a result.

Conclusion

The Project Manager has to have an effective process with clear lines of communication. This will enable the Project Manager to feel secure in the knowledge that everyone is kept in the loop. They can then focus on the tasks and problems in front of them. Teamgantt.com has some excellent and free Communication Plans you can download along with more useful tips.

This concludes part one of five vital skills for Project Managers. Don’t miss the next blog in the series, when we will be talking about Leadership

If you wish to learn more about this topic, take a look at our Introduction to Project Management and Effective Communication courses.

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Asking Effective Questions

Questions help us to gather information, clarify facts, and communicate with others. They are a key element of effective communication. In this blog, you will see how you can improve results by making changes to how you ask questions.

Management and Communication

In our “Introduction to Management” course, we look at the importance of a new manager’s communication and how vital it is to help your team increase productivity, efficiency and for you to get the results you expect from your team.

The impact of asking the right questions on team performance cannot be underestimated.

Here are some questioning techniques that you can use:

Closed questions

Closed questions limit the answer to usually yes or no, some examples include:

“Have you identified all the resources required?”

“Have you hit your targets this month?”

Although closed questions tend to shut down communication, they can be useful if you are searching for a specific piece of information. For example, you can use them when you need exact answers, fact checking, or summarising. Think quantitative data.

Open questions

Open questions get their name because the response is open-ended; the person answering has a wide range of options to choose from when responding. Open questions are great conversation starters. They can be useful for fuller fact finding, to enhance communication to a greater depth, and of course they are useful if you need to get a full answer from someone. Open questions use one of six words as a root:

    • Who?
    • What?
    • Where?
    • When?
    • Why?
    • How?

TED/PIE

A simple tool to help ask great questions is the TED method, which stands for:

Tell me

Explain

Describe

 

You can also add the PIE method alongside TED to enhance your questions even more. PIE stands for:

Precisely

In detail

Exactly

As an example you could ask:

“Tell me precisely…?”

“Explain to me in detail…?”

“Describe exactly…?”

 

 

Other question types

There is a toolbox of probing questions that we can use. Each type serves a specific purpose.

Clarification

By probing for clarification, you invite the other person to share more information so that you can fully understand their message.

“What does … look like?” (Any of the five senses can be used here)

Completeness and Correctness

These types of questions can help you ensure you have the full, true story. Having all the facts can protect you from assuming and jumping to conclusions – two fatal barriers to communication.

“What else happened after that?”

Determining Relevance

This category will help you determine how a point is related to the conversation. It can also help you get the speaker back on track from a tangent.

“How does that relate to…?”

Drilling Down
Use these types of questions to nail down vague statements.

“What do you mean by…?”  or “Could you please give an example?”

Summarising
These questions are framed more like a statement, and they pull together all the relevant points. They can be used to confirm to the listener that you heard what was said, and to give them an opportunity to correct any misunderstandings.

“So you are after a product that is fast but also efficient?”

Remember, paraphrasing means repeating what you think the speaker said but in your own words.

Closing Thoughts

Simple, eh? (Closed question there) So remember… the wording of the questions you ask can have a significant impact on the responses you receive. By following these tips, you can improve efficiency and communication skills within your team. It could be an easy productivity win!