The Tower of Babel

This story takes place after the great floods when Noah’s ark saved a group of people to continue humanity. After landing these people migrated towards the Mesopotamia region. One thing was common about this group, everyone spoke the same language.

One fine day the group decided to build a tower, so big that its top will reach the heavens. They had a clear mission, manpower, material, time and adequate technology. God sees this and thinks that if this is built, people will no longer go out to seek help. They will be able to achieve whatever they will set their mind to. So what he does to disrupt the project? He confounds their speech so that everyone starts speaking a different language. The tower never got built.

Communication. This one factor that can decide the success of a project. For a big project, this becomes even more important as the number of interactions has the complexity of n to the power 2, where n is the number of team members.

Communication remains one of the tough things to manage on a project. Every time something goes wrong we try to pin it down to a communication failure. Sometimes it is just perspective, one person will argue that all was communicated and the other would say that it was not in a way that was expected.

Recently, I came across an article[1] that outlines the following 4-step process for effective communication in a project and provides some structure:

1.     Identify Communication Requirements

The project manager and the project team work together to identify who needs what information. An organisation chart comes in handy to understand who needs to be informed

2.     Identify the 5Ws (Why, What, When, Where, Who) and 1H (How).

Who needs to be communicated to. What needs to be communicated. When it should be communicated. Why communicate. How the communication needs to be done.

3.     Identify and Accommodate the Enterprise Environmental Factors

These include factors like organisational culture, standards, regulations, stakeholder risk tolerance, etc.

4.     Identify Organizational Process Assets

The organizational process assets affect how the project manager, project team, and stakeholders will communicate within a project. These include assets like, change control procedures, issue and defect management databases, project financial databases, etc.

[1] Rajkumar, S. (2010). Art of communication in project management. Paper presented at PMI? Research Conference: Defining the Future of Project Management, Washington, DC. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management Institute.