We can all agree that the recent innovations in the field of communication have brought radical changes to today’s business landscape. By enabling instant transmission of text and numbers and establishing a constant stream of information between remote or co-located colleagues, streamlining communication among project stakeholders has become easier than ever before.
Communication is Vital for Teams
Most projects these days have a virtual element and often see collaboration with professional team members across the globe. In such a context, communication within a project team is becoming even more complex and challenging. While every project manager would list communication as one of the most important factors for project success, it is also a fact that communication by itself means nothing if it’s not effective and efficient, which can also have a serious effect on the outcome of a project. According to the Project Management Institute, 90% of the time in a project is spent on communication, and 30% of all project failures are due to inadequate communication.
Although one might realize the necessity and importance of constant communication, there is also a need to be practical and effective. With so many different communication and reporting methods, keeping things streamlined can become especially demanding and challenging. Thankfully, there are many online tools that have been proven effective for streamlining communication. These tools have been built specifically to accommodate the needs of enterprises and assist in promoting better communication and enabling project transparency, while avoiding communication overload.
Find the Right Tools
When working towards streamlining communications and establishing project transparency, the first thing to do is invest some crucial time in searching and testing the suitable tools that match your organization’s particular needs, as well as subsequently training your project’s team in implementing them.
- Adopt a communication stream that provides all stakeholders with the ability to communicate and chat in real-time, sharing ideas, information and work status over tools such as Slack.
- Select a secure and solid tool to protect and share project files with the your team that provides the ability to manage access to the shared content, using tools such as Dropbox or Box.
- Introduce a common means of remote communication to conduct meetings and conference calls from a secure line, such as GoToMeeting.
- Start using a project management tool that will help you to manage workflow, assign tasks, define due dates, set milestones and keep track of the project’s development.
Although these diverse tools have been designed to effectively streamline internal communication and fit the demands of every enterprise, experience shows that, at times, there can be difficulty in combining all of these different platforms and keeping track of all the information shared through these channels. Employees state that there is a need to go beyond the creation of additional lines of communication and employ one method that can facilitate the coordination and monitoring of the project’s activities and progress.
Planview AdaptiveWork Can Help
There is no doubt that the introduction of new technologies for streamlining communication between a project team and stakeholders can be of crucial importance. But there is a difference between adopting several communication tools to facilitate reporting and workflow management and building an effective and efficient system of communication that gathers all of these critical processes in one place. Several online collaborative tools, such as Planview AdaptiveWork, combine these operations into one single cloud-based project management software platform, that provides maximum control for the project manager while fast and effective communication between the project stakeholders is supported, team collaboration is promoted and project transparency is established.
