Review the following scenarios, and then write a paragraph for each one describing what media you think would be most appropriate to use and why. See table 10-2 for suggestion (Schwalbe, page 419).
a. Many of technical staff on the project come in from 9:30 to 10:00 a.m. while the business users always come in before 9:00 a.m. The business users have been making comments. The project manager wants to have the technical people come in by 9:00, although many of them leave late.
b. Your company is bidding on a project for the entertainment industry. You know that you need new ideas on how to put together the proposal and communicate your approach in a way that will impress the customer.
c. Your business has been growing successfully, but you are becoming inundated with phone calls and e-mails asking similar types of questions.
d. You need to make a general announcement to a large group of people and want to make sure they get the information.
a. I think that effective communication is the most important requirement for a project to succeed, however the project manager has to understand the needs of the team members to build a good workplace and receive from them what is expected to. In this case the project manager is trying to make the team committed to the project and at the same time deliver a general agreement to the group, so according to the table 10-2 (Schwalbe, p. 394) the items assessing commitment and building consensus would be suitable to transmit the idea of starting and ending working hours. In either way, scheduling a meeting would be the most appropriate type of media and a phone call would be adequate. A meeting is usually better, even though not the most convenient way because finding a time that is suitable for everybody sometimes is a problem, a phone call is not enough to show how important what the person wants to express is. The project manager is also trying to mediate a conflict between business users and technical staff to establish the most suitable time to everybody without leaving anything misunderstood. The other types of media would be inappropriate just because they would not show strong communication for this matter.
b. In this case, there are two different tasks to be executed; the first one is to put the ideas together to develop the proposal and the second one is to demonstrate to the client the followed approaches and present them in a way to impress him. For the first task, confidentiality is important since a person needs to be careful when handling information that involves the future of a project, so a meeting, hard copy and phone call would be appropriate means of communication for this phase. In the a meeting a person could collect the information needed to create the proposal, the phone call would be the way to clarify doubts and some extra needs that may occur but it would eventually need some formal paper documenting the proposal, therefore a hard copy would be also necessary. For the second task when the person tries to persuade the client with his offer, it is important to have the interaction face to face because it is a way to create empathy and win the situation, sometimes a person gets more that he thought he would, it is also a way to accelerate the transference of information (Levin, 2005). If the client has some doubts, a meeting would be the simplest, easiest and quickest way to raise and clarify the doubts. A phone call, website or hard copy would not be appropriate since the person would be dealing with complex instructions although a report would be a good way to keep the client informed about how things are going.
c. When a business starts growing, some of the activities performed in a daily basis become redundant to the company, so it is important that some changes occur to keep the company processes updated and easy to be handled, perhaps it is necessary additional employees or a system that performs and organizes most of the activities to avoid phone calls and emails with similar enquiries that make some employee allocate their time whilst they could be performing more important tasks for the company. This is a matter of building consensus for what should be done in the company among all the departments not to overload anyone with unnecessary work. Since the main objective is to change some routines, a good type of media would be a meeting where everybody involved could exchange information, give new ideas and share knowledge, therefore essential information would be reached by the right people at the right time. Phone calls and emails are also good but just after the meeting to add up some things that were left out.
d. When a person needs to address some information to a large number of people and ensure they all get the message, the best way is to public on a website or send emails, internet postings are effective ways to transfer information among people, however, it is important to know how to use this means because poor writing often leads to misunderstandings and confusion (Schwalbe, p.407). The advantages of using a website as means of communication are that the information can be updated at any time, the information is available at any time the staff wants to access and the website can be linked to other subjects to create new opportunities and transmit different ideas at the same time. The other types of media such as phone calls, meetings and voice mails would be inappropriate when the purpose is to transmit the idea to a large number of people. Imagine how long a person would take if he had to make 10 or 100 calls (depending on the number of people that need to receive the same information) to transmit the same idea).
References
Schwalbe, K., (2006) – Information Technology Project Management – Fourth Edition – Cambridge, MA: Course Technology/Thompson Learning
Levin, G., (2005) – Requirements for effective project communications – From allPM Website Retrieved October 24, 2007 from http://www.allpm.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1357&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
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