Steve Neiderhauser posted some excellent commentary in a blog post titled “Persuasion Equation“. In the post, Steve mentions a class he attended that helped with communication skills. In the blog post he writes:
In the class I learned language patterns and that people have different thinking modalities: Auditory, Visual, Kinesthetic, Gustatory, Olfactory. The training leans toward the sales side, but the information can also be used by managers or change agents.
Fact is, the Project Management Institute tells us that management is 90% communication. And yet, the only thing I remember from my PMI training is that there’s a sender, a receiver, a message. I’m sure there’s more. Perhaps I dozed off during one of the key 44 processes.
Steve makes a great point. I’ve said for a long time that Project Management should focus more on leadership and communication skills over process. That said, process and standards are important…but without the proper leadership and communication capabilities, a project will fail. We need to get Project Managers to spend more of their time leading projects and less time working through the 44 processes.
Now…I’ve got to go find out what “Gustatory” means 🙂
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4 responses to “Communication in Project Management”
I was a pretty good project manager until every methodology under the sun came into being. Then project management turned into the documentation job and not communication and matrix management.
Documentation is important, but not at the expense of getting things done (in project management; code is a different story).
I think we’ve gone past the pale with documentation instead of action in project management.
Scot Herrick’s last blog post..“Betrayal at the Hands of Corporate America”
@Scot Herrick: You are so right Scot. At some point we moved away from getting things done and moved into process and documentation.
Or, as I use to say, we moved away from looking for results and moved into looking for procedures… Just ask oruselves what our function and objectives are… Results or procedures?
Hi Joan: Well said!