Project Communication And Management

Write an executive summary for 1 page and base on the following paper.

The part Complexity and channels is very important so please mention in the summary

Communication Scope

Background

According to (Kerzner, 2003), scope of work in project communication and management refers to all the deliverable that should be met in order for the objectives of the project to be met. In this case, this sums all the activities, and resources needed to make reach and mobilize the Boston University community and operate a minor-league baseball franchise on the site of its Nickerson Field complex. It would involve outlining the processes and stages of achieving the objectives. We will be the project manager (PM) and team for the project to achieve this goal, and we will be responsible for planning, organizing and implementing the infrastructure to support the expected franchise of the joint venture. This communication project is as a part of the sport project which will include considerations for traffic management, security, services (including catering), cleaning, maintenance and facility management.

 

 

Scope of the communication plan

Communication activities that would facilitate the success of this project would be numerous, considering the number of stakeholders involved. The success of the day of the game, largely depends on the activities carried out during the preparation period. Efficient preparation is rooted in effective coordination, which is an aspect of communication. There will therefore be a plan to establish an efficient communication system within the team members. Communication activities will extend to the publics expected to attend the game. With regards to ensuring an attendance of more than 10,000 people during the day of the game, having an extensive knowledge of the target population is key. The target audience is very large. Within which the population is heterogeneous. It includes students, teachers and people involved in different occupations within and around Boston University. This therefore brings about a target population comprising of people with different levels of education, different interests and commitments. Some of these people will be interested in attending the game, while others might not even be interested. Regardless, the objective is to win over a minimum of 10,000 people. For the success of this project, the process would involve carrying out communication campaigns over a large number of people. Given that the targeted population is vast and heterogeneous, the process of mobilization will have to be inclusive and tailored to engage all the involved people.

 

 Timeline of the project (runjia) 

Time Management is essentially the ability to organize and plan the time spent on activities in a day. The result of good time management is increased effectiveness and productivity. It is a key aspect of project management and involves skills such as planning, setting goals and prioritizing for a better performance(Tran, 2015).

A lack of effective time management can have a negative impact on a project in the long run. Time is one of the three triple constraints and any deviation from the schedule has an effect on the cost and scope of a project. In most cases, time really is money. Ineffective time management can also increase stress and frustration in the project manager and the team members.

Today’s world offers a lot of distractions. Emails, instant messages, funny animal videos and so on. It is important to eliminate these distractions while working so that you can focus on the important tasks at hand. Planning is key in project management. An effective planning method is to identify all the tasks that you need to do to complete a project. Planning is key in project management. An effective planning method is to identify all the tasks that need to be done to complete a project.

1. Decide overall design direction, convey ideas, illustrate major program components,           environmental systems and are intended to engage discussion.

2. Prepare precedence project studies of existing sports facilities with similar program elements and attributes that are proposed for the Plan for comparison and discussion purposes.

3.  Start communications with stakeholders from high to low influence

(will be shown in a table timeline in the appendix)

1- Boston University

2- Sponsors

3- Police

4-……..

 

Stakeholder analysis

A necessary step towards the communication plan is represented by the stakeholder analysis. According to the Project Management Institute (PMI, 1996) stakeholders are individuals and organizations who are actively involved in the project, or whose interests may be positively or negatively affected as a result of project execution or successful project completion.

First, each stakeholder was identified and classified as to their influence and interest on the project. After that, their attitude towards the project was recognized and they were identified as Opponent, Indifferent, Follower and Advocate referring to an increasing positive attitude towards the project. Possible actions to move the stakeholders from their current attitude to a higher level of positive attitude were subsequently identified.

As the Nickerson Field project can attract a lot of audience many external elements must be taken into account.

We expect that all Boston University students, being part of the Boston University community, will be affected by the project and also affect it. For instance, a major affluence among Boston University students is expected during the BU league matches and for this reason the project management team must be keep an eye on their attitude and try to engage them as much as they can. Important stakeholders would be all those ensuring safe and emergency services, including the Police, Medical and Fire department and the project management team must be sure to keep them informed on the matches dates.

 

The stakeholder engagement matrix can be found in Appendix 1.

Roles and Responsibilities (Simon)

To clearly define who is doing what within a project enables the team to improve the overall efficiency by eliminating unnecessary confusion, then we decide to use RACI chart in our project. According to Harned, RACI is “a simple matrix used to assign roles and responsibilities for each task, milestone, or decision on a project” (Harned, 2019). In fact, RACI is an acronym standing for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed, and each of them represents different level of responsibility.

 

Responsible – the roles who are responsible to work and complete the assigned tasks. Every task needs at least one R and can have more than one.

Accountable – a role who is ultimately responsible for an activity. Each task or deliverable only has one Accountable party.

Consulted – the roles working as a subject matter expert to provide useful information or input relative to the task. Those parties are not involved in the activity directly.

Informed – the roles that need to be kept update of project progress, rather than getting involved in the details of specific tasks.

 

The purpose of RACI chart is to map out who is responsible for what and at which level in an easily understandable matrix (Austin, n.d.). Implementing RACI chart benefits the project team a lot, for example, it not only encourages individuals to take responsibility for their own tasks, but also avoids an overload of manpower and tasks. In all, it improves the overall efficiency among project team members. With the tasks throughout the project cycle from initiation to close, we filled out the roles who highly involved in the project and assigned them with corresponding roles – R, A, C or I, which can be found in appendix 3.

 

Plan Risk Management (Mohammed)

When it comes to risks, this project is surrounded by several risks that can be an obstacle to the progress of the project. However, considering the project manager spends most of his time communicating, the risk planning will be focused on the communication risks mainly. With the increasing number of stakeholders, communication can develop many risks that are considered as barriers to communication, including but not limited to noise both physical and psychological noises, organizational and individual (Rajkumar, 2010). The table below explores many of the potential communication risks identified within this project:

Risk	Probability	Impact	Mitigation
Unclear Message.	Possible	Major	Clarify your ideas before communicating.
Noises during meetings.	Certain	Major	Establish ground rules, and procedures for conducting an effective meeting.
Derailing from the project goal.	Possible	Catastrophic	Conduct meetings to align all members on a regular schedule or live interaction streaming.
Difficult and too technical messages.	Likely	Major	Ensure all receivers understood the message and ask for feedback.
Emotional interface.	Possible	Major	Establish ground rules and stop if occurs.
Lack of follow up.	Likely	Major	Set a suitable time based on the taks and the message to follow up.

 

Communication channel:

As Schwalbe (2017) describes, one of the greatest threats towards a project being a success is the failure to communicate. She proclaims that a project manager spends 90% of the time communicating since they simply do not make any plans or considerations for it (Schwalbe, 2017). It can be argued that a plan for communication does not necessarily mean that all communication will be without errors, but it can be argued that it definitely helps. Creating a communication plan for the communication within a project, therefore strengthens the project. Bad communication can affect the project and end up being a costly affair, if the project manager has to redo work (Burke and Barron, 2014). Communication within a project can be divided into four different types: “…Formal Written…Formal Verbal…Informal Verbal…Informal Written…” (Warburton and Kanabar, 2018, p. 304). These four different types are normally all being used in every project, whether it is formal communication between the project team internally, though emails or meeting minutes or it being externally towards stakeholders in an informal verbal way through a casual conversation (Burke and Barron, 2014). When creating the communication plan, all of these four types of communication has to be considered. With a vast and the limitation of face-to-face communication in such a project, the PM cannot rely solely on face-to-face communication to broadcast messages, procedures, and directions, thus, it is essential to choose another form of medium.

 

Communication Complexity VS number of channels

Every project contains some level of complexity, and to make it even more complex, different PM’s of projects, have their own subjective understanding of what complexity is (Yugue and Maximiano, 2012). One of the things that is complex within a project like this, is the many communication channels. A communication channel can be defined as: “…the path a message follows from the sender to the receiver.” (Maltzman, 2019). This means there can be a great amount of communication channels, since it flows through every possible path between the stakeholders involved in a project. When more stakeholders are identified and added to a project, the communication number will increase. The increasing number of communication channels will increase the communication complexity. In order to identify the number of channels in a project versus the number of stakeholders in the project, the following formula can be used: x = { n(n-1)/2 } where n is the number of stakeholders and x is the outcome and the number of channels. As we have identified 25 involved stakeholders the formula will look like this: x = {25(25-1)/2}, and give us 300 possible communication channels. It should however be noted, that we have assumed that a stakeholder is just a single person, which in reality it is not. In a project like this, the communication channels can never be calculated with complete accuracy, however it gives an idea of the level of complexity just within the communication part in a project like this. As a last example, there is 34,292 students currently enrolled at Boston University (Boston University, N.d.). The communication channels for them alone is staggering 58,795,386, which truly shows the complexity involved.  

 

Method of Communication:

The latest PMBOK guide (PMI, 2017), defines the planning of communication as “The process of developing an appropriate approach and plan for project communication activities based on the information needs of each stakeholder or group, available organizational assets and the needs of the project.” (PMI, 2017, p. 359). Before being able to analyze the communication plan further, it is necessary to have identified the various stakeholders involved, since they are what most of the communication plan is centered around. In the previous section of the paper, the stakeholder identification were described. As mentioned beforehand, the stakeholder analysis can be found in appendix 1.

 

Building further on this analysis, we now need to know what type of information has to be communicated to the identified stakeholders, and what medium is used to communicate the message. For this we create and plan an overview of how to communicate with the stakeholders involved. This is put together in a Communication Matrix which can be found in appendix 2. In short, the communication matrix gives an overview of what should be communicated to who, and how often it should be communicated to follow up, as well as including which method to be used. The communication matrix in appendix 2, distinguish between daily, weekly and bi-weekly communication. Not every stakeholder identified, needs the same level of information. Furthermore, the communication matrix contains whether the method of communication is by email or via face-to-face communication. In these times most of our communication is through email and telephones, making the whole communication part possible from one office (Burke and Barron, 2014) however, some of the stakeholders still need to maintain face-to-face communication. The frequency are also included in the communication matrix as well. Different information flows back and forth the stakeholders involved, and therefore the frequency of this information also varies. Some information will be communicated on a weekly basis where other information will come on a daily basis. Lastly, the communication matrix also contain what type of information that will be communicated to which stakeholder. The main outcome is to define what information should be communicated, in order for the recipient to feel involved, and part of the project, as well as to solve any decisions or possible issues (Burke and barron, 2014). It is important once stakeholders are identified with respect to the power, interests and attitude in order to establish the plan of communication, even though it is clear that the stakeholders with the high power will take the highest attention, however, it is always important to keep an eye on the stakeholder with the highest “negative” interest and try to change the interest as they may unexpectedly gain some power over the project.

 

Stakeholder Communication. 

It depends on the receiver and if the communication is between organizations, departments or project distributed teams. When it comes to the project teams with delegations and empowerment the communication could be reduced to a weekly updates, however, not all the time. Below we will explore them in more depth:

This section can include:

· Examples of how to communicate with some of the stakeholders.

· Not all stakeholders, but stakeholders with the highest power and highest influence (or low power but high interest predicted to have high power)

· If possible group them by something. For instance “Traffic communication”.

 

 

Best practices (Raven + everyone)

1.     Pre-Project Stakeholder Analysis

Before the whole project started, a stakeholder analysis needed to be done. The definition of a stakeholder is “Individuals and organizations who are actively involved in the project, or whose interests may be positively or negatively affected as a result of project execution or successful project completion” (PMI, 1996). This analysis could help us (the project management team) to figure those who involved in the project and then we could build the communication plan smoothly and completely. Also, if the project management team failed to deliver the needs of just one stakeholder at a critical time, it could ruin a whole project (Smith, 2000).

[Be sure to add a section on Stakeholder ID] [Include HOW you did your brainstorming]

2.     Adapt different communication methods

After stakeholders were identified, the methods communication happens between them need to be decided. Different kind of stakeholders should adapt different communication methods properly, or communications would be mess easily. For instance, we could use WhatsApp when communicate to each other within the project management team, however, we could not reach out to the audience by this method. Communication methods should be different from each other, so that information within the project could be delivered to all kinds of stakeholders efficiently and correctly.

3.     Develop the ability to come across the problem

As mentioned above, risks happen all the time during the communication process. Project management team has to make sure that information could still flow smoothly and frequently under any situations with a risk. For instance, to avoid lacking follow ups, the team could make a rule that when discussing in a group chat, everyone should illustrate at least one opinion. The more powerful the project management team is when it comes to problems, the more deliverable this project could be.

Recommendations ( Raven)

 

1. Stakeholder Management – Keep updating in a regular period and require feedback (stakeholders change and stakeholder power and interest is dynamic)

2. Stakeholder Management – Make sure to provide enough information to stakeholders but not overwhelmed

3. Risk Management – identify threats early  before they become severe

4. Team Management – Assign work to every single person to make sure everyone is clear about their responsibilities and no one would try to get rid of their parts.