Chapter Fourteen. Project Communications Management

The topic of project communications management is interesting because although it gets little focus on the examination (there are less than eight questions on this topic), it almost always ranks as one of the management areas students and professionals consider the most important for the success of a project. Although there may be few questions that are directly from this chapter, there will be other topics in other knowledge areas that can be found under the heading of communication. (For instance, lessons learned are a form of written historical communication.) Although there are certainly several topic areas on the examination and in the text that are valuable, it must be noted that the area of management and organizational communication is much deeper and more researched than the short chapter included in the PMBOK. Most of the people who have taken the examination noted that the communications questions were among the easiest on the examination.

The PMBOK states that project communications management includes "the processes required to ensure timely and appropriate generation, collection, dissemination, storage, retrieval, and ultimate disposition of project information. It provides critical links among people and information that are necessary for project success." As with any form of management, the ability to receive and understand information, send clear and correct information, analyze incoming information, and get data in a form where the data can become useful information are key parts of a manager's function in any capacity, be it project or general management. The professional manager will always have critical tasks that involve communication. As a matter of fact, there are very, very few tasks that a manager does that do not have a component of communication in them.

Q.	Information is not useful to the receiver if it is not ________.
		A.	Timely
		B.	Interesting
		C.	Complex
		D.	Scarce

The answer is A. In order for information to be useful, it must come at the correct time.

The PMBOK shows four processes in project communications management: communications planning, information distribution, performance reporting, and manag(ing) stakeholders. Again, the processes overlap each other, and in many cases, it is difficult if not impossible to see where one process begins and another ends. It should be noted that my degree is in communication, not communications. Departments in various universities around the country use the singular form; they are communication departments.