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Proper, effective and efficient communication on the project may be the single most important ingredient to project success. I feel strongly that project communication is the most important part of a project manager's daily responsibilities and overall good communication is the responsibility of every stakeholder on the project. Drop the ball on communication and you might be looking at re-work, a missed deadline, expenses pushing the project over budget and customer concerns or misunderstandings that can drive a project into the ground – faster than you can ever imagine.


There is no magic wand to wave that will ensure that a project won't suffer issues or even that a project that starts out with a formal communication plan in hand and a project leader dedicated to staying on top of all communication channels at all times won't still suffer from communication breakdowns.


Review status regularly as a team. Since a tightly knit, cohesive team is usually tantamount to success, it would make sense that a team that communicates well, accurately, and frequently is also more likely to experience success and high productivity. Therefore, regularly scheduled team meetings, communication, and tasks and status review is always going to be a good idea. Keep in mind, It doesn't always have to be a meeting. Daily updates via email can be enough to make your team feel like they know everything about the project at any given minute. One of my business analysts on a project – who was also working on three other projects with three other project managers – told me that I received more emails from me than the others and always felt like he knew the project status much better because of it and he knew what tasks he should be working on at any given time.


Keep meetings regular. Regular meetings = a stable stakeholder environment = communications that are comfortable and open. If you are conducting – as you should be – regular weekly project status meetings with the project customer and weekly project team meetings to keep the team focused and up to date, keep those meetings no matter what. Even if there isn't much to say at any given meeting, still conduct it...even if it ends up being a 5 minute meeting to talk about what everyone is doing this weekend. You never know when some piece of key project information may slip through the cracks when a meeting is canceled that should have otherwise been held. Plus, when you start to cancel meetings, people who would normally be in attendance may feel that your meetings aren't as critical as other meetings they could be attending and your attendance and participation levels may drop. You've then lost key participants and decision makers and that can be disastrous for the project and it's often very difficult to rein those individuals back in.


Follow up on key communications. Always, always, always followup. Making sure everyone is on the same page after meetings, after key brainstorming or troubleshooting sessions and following customer communications is critical to moving forward in the right direction. Followup with notes and ask for a 24 hour turnaround response with any feedback or changes from those involved in the discussions. Redistribute with any necessary changes and everyone will be back on the same page again.


Summary / call for input


Communication is Job One for the project manager, in my opinion. Keep communication in order and you've taken huge steps to ensuring project success and top project team performance for your project customer. If you are experiencing any communication issues, noticing and miscommunication that is cloud requirements and scope understanding for the team or a situation where people aren't taken the same understanding from meetings you're conducting, try these three actions on your project to get things back on track. A strong line of communication with the project customer is also a very good way to keep customer satisfaction high and hopefully secure repeat business from your project clients.


Readers – what are your thoughts on project communication issues? What do you commonly see as communication issues on the projects and how do you best avoid or mitigate those issues?

​As professionals - hopefully very competent professionals - it's always important that we have a high degree of confidence in our own skills and abilities to deliver. Especially our ability to deliver in pressure situations. I'm not saying project managers should be narcissists...but maybe it doesn't hurt if you're fairly close to falling into that category.


The business world is usually not for the very timid or faint of heart. If we head into projects, business initiatives or strategic undertakings with less than 110% confidence in our own ability to deliver - or at least the appearance thereof - our competition is likely to eat us for lunch, figuratively speaking, of course.


So when we are called out by our colleagues on something - maybe even just some helpful advice from an observation - we may be taken aback, we may get defensive, we may deflect the remark by shooting something meaningless but hurtful back at them or we may just plain 'unfriend' them in our minds and have little or nothing to do with them in our professional lives going forward...much like the petty arguments my mom used to have with my aunts when they would go years without speaking. Crazy and childish, but it happens.


There's a bible verse that goes like this..."first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."


In reality, we need to not shoot back at these often very well meaning individuals. We need to take what they are saying for what it is...an unbiased observation and something we should probably look into in ourselves and our behaviors and probably improve our way of doing whatever we may be doing inefficiently. If they felt strongly enough about it to say something to us, then it just may be important enough for us to take heed. We should probably listen to this information we’ve been given and take it for what it likely is …. helpful, constructive advice. Don't assume you're perfect and everyone else is wrong. I’ve been there enough and it has taken me time to recognize advice for what it actually is and to not think of it as criticism or to immediately think the other person is wrong. I must admit – I’m still not very good at receiving this information – just ask my wife – but I am getting there.


Summary


Here's my bottom line on this. Like it or not, take advantage of it or not...the project manager is in a powerful position. If you're a good confident leader as the project manager, the you can really be the most influential and powerful person on the project. And you really should be. But be able to take feedback, criticism, corrective suggestions. It's important as we should never be standoff-ish to our customer or colleagues or, heaven forbid, our senior leadership. Listen well and be open and appreciative to such feedback - you're likely to come out of it a better leader than you were before.

​The concept Project integration management is a key skill that is the tightly woven into the PM industry standard processes laid out by the Project Management Institute (PMI). As defined by PMI, project integration management are the processes and activities needed to integrate the various elements of project management, which are identified, defined, combined, unified, and coordinated within the Project Management Process Groups.


Within the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK) guide, project management processes are presented as discrete components with well-defined interfaces. That’s nice in theory. However, in reality – most project managers understand that project processes, components, tasks, and deliverables actually overlap and interact in ways that are never really dealt with in the PMI standards guidebook.


Primarily, project integration management is concerned with ensuring that the elements making up a project are properly coordinated so that project goals are achieved. The key is coordination, integration, and efficient team work. Using project integration management, all the pieces of a complex project plan need to fit together achieving a sort of balance between project time, project cost, and overall quality. The project manager, therefore, is left with the responsibility of handling the chores of integration management while understandably needing to make tradeoffs between competing or conflicting project (and executive management) objectives.


Most experienced PM practitioners know there is no single way to manage a project. They apply their PM knowledge, skills, and processes in whatever way is necessary to achieve these project objectives and – ideally – finish with a successful completion of the project or projects they are managing.


Of course, the project manager has tools at their disposal to do this. Tools and templates exist for managing project budgets, capturing requirements, building test and use cases, and creating many project planning deliverables (such as design documents, communication plans, risk management plans, project charters, etc.). There are boundless ways to manage resource usages and prepare resource forecasts and there are now hundreds of project management task scheduling tools in existence – many free – so, gone are the days of being tied to Microsoft Project as the PM’s only real option for managing teams, tasks, deliverables, and the customer.


But what are we really doing? Will tools make the project manager successful at integrating all of the tasks, information, and processes within a project to arrive at a successful project deployment? No. Will PMI certification ensure that this will happen? While it may help by giving a project manager nice tools and a knowledge baseline reference to ‘get it done’ the answer is still really ‘no’. Projects don’t flow perfectly. They often aren’t well defined. It takes experience across many projects, it takes a project manager who can make good decisions on the fly, and it takes a leader who is grounded yet flexible, to successfully deliver on projects that are often subject to requirements changes, moving timelines, and pressure from outside entities that weren’t initially part of the project plan.


Focus on the end goals of the project and proper utilization of the resources available – including the skilled project team and willing project customer – are key ingredients to project success and the successful integration management of all the deliverables, information and processes on any given project that flow from one phase to the next.


Summary


As stated earlier, project integration focuses on the streamlined flow of information, activities, tasks, and deliverables from phase to phase and process to process. The reality of the projects we all manage on a daily basis is that there rarely – if ever – is a streamlined flow. The challenge for the project manager then, is to manage projects with the real-world mentality and viewpoint, being able to adjust, coordinate, and control overlapping deliverables and information flows and handle competing and conflict requirements and constraints. Communication, as always, is key, and information dissemination to the team and customer is essential.

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Cybersecurity. Likely to be one of the most sought after professions in the 2020’s. Project management doesn't really change that much. New project management software comes out from new or existing providers and the Project Management Institute (PMI) revises the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) every so often. And new PM consulting services and resources and training organizations are formed. But for the most part, project management as a profession stays rather static. PM best practices are logical best steps to reporting on, effectively and successfully leading and efficiently deploying projects and end solutions. They may differ a bit from project manager to project manager and from organization to organization, but they are what they are...logical best steps to PM success.


However, there are some new developments in IT of course and in project management related to project security and we need to be paying attention. Hacking and cyber crime is on the rise. It's changing technology, it's changing the landscape of the data and sensitive information on the projects we are leading and it should definitely be changing the way we plan for and approach these projects we are managing. Getting hacked isn't just something that happens to someone else anymore. It's happened to more than 40% of my project and consulting clients to some degree over the past 2-3 years and that number will only go up.


Here are four areas where I see cyber risks affecting our organizations, project management infrastructures and the actual projects we are managing starting right now and heading into 2018 and beyond...be ready, and proactive or be sorry.


Fingerprint security and hacking. Not a lot has been said about what happens if a large or national or critical database full of fingerprints gets hacked. Our identity being in danger as customers of a big retail store that gets hacked is one thing. It's inconvenient, we get a new credit card, maybe wait for FDIC insured dollars to be restored to us or our credit reports to get fixed. But our fingerprints? We can't get new ones of those. I predict a huge fingerprint database hack in the next 12-24 months. It could affect office places and computer equipment that use fingerprints as security access, and it could also affect court cases and forensic evidence. Next those hacked fingerprints will be used on special gloves by the bad guys to frame innocent people when they break into stores, homes and workplaces or even commit murders. That's scary stuff!


C-level cyber security. I realize this is already happening. We have C-level security officers known, of course, as CSOs or Chief Security Officers. But is it truly cyber crime and cyber security they are tagged with? Or is it more disaster recovery and overall security. Cyber crime is on the rise every day and hackers are always one step ahead of the rest of the population, no matter what you are doing to combat them. They just may be refining their attack so you haven't heard from them yet. Comforting, right? We need the right leadership at the top of our organizations to help plan for avoiding and combating it.


Project security ongoing presence in all large projects and organizations. Project security will become a full-fledged presence in all high visibility large scale projects and any projects with any degree of data sensitivity...which will include most tech projects judging from the experiences I've had in my work history. If we don't plan to avoid or react we will be sorry. Cyber crime is real and your project doesn't even need to be handling sensitive data to be at risk. It could be customer contact information that gets stolen. Anything – any security breach on the project – could stand in the way of customer confidence and customer satisfaction. Planning is our best tool – we must be doing it.


Customer insistence on cyber security proof of concept. That security or disaster recovery proof of concept is common on government projects. Especially when data sensitivity is high and downtime would be critical to the success of the project. You may need to show you can be up and running in 24 hours somewhere else or somewhere secure if a flood or massive data base breech were to occur. But private sector projects of usually been immune to this type of proof of service. Not anymore. Expect the typical tech project of any reasonable size, complexity or data sensitivity to require this as part of the project requirements going forward in 2018 and beyond. We live in a different world. More than 20 years ago I ran government projects worth millions of dollars handling millions of sensitive financial records and no one cared about security – only recovery and project continuity in the face of a disaster. Today, with cloud based storage and processing and the persistence and skills of hacking the relative frequency and damage of a hacker strike, expect it to be the norm going forward.


Summary / call for input


I do believe that hacking and concerns for cyber security, data integrity and identity theft are here to stay. Plus, I believe that they will only get worse over time. The need for us to pay more attention to this concern during project planning and during risk planning and management is increasing and only getting more critical. We must be working to proactively and reactively plan ways of handling cyber crime and cyber security not only on data sensitive projects but on every single project. It needs to at least be a touchpoint and consideration on every project even if all we do is consider it and decide there isn't enough of a risk on a particular engagement. It needs to be a permanent checklist item.


Readers – what are your thoughts on cyber crime and cyber security as part of risk management? Perhaps you're in an industry where you've identified it as critical to be included already – please share your thoughts and what actions you are taking. How confident are your customers in your ability to avert hacking and cyber crime's affects? If you aren't already practicing risk management for cyber security measures, are you planning to start? Please share and discuss.

Do you or your organization have Mac de-commissioned Mac equipment (MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac or iPad) that isn't being used and just collecting dust? If so, consider sending it to me for my "Macs for Cancer" campaign. Our 11 year old son was diagnosed with Leukemia 15 months ago with many painful clinic and hospital visits and more to come over the next several years including blood lab work, transfusions and lumbar punctures.

It's no joy ride. But this equipment can help keep their minds of these painful procedures and distract them when they feel miserable with gaming like Minecraft, etc. It can also help them do their school online when necessary because the often can't be in school with immune systems at zero during these necessary treatment years. Please consider and contact me if you want to help. Thank you!!

Contact me. If you want your Project Management or Cybersecurity software or service featured on a high visibility site like Project Times, contact me. I'm putting together an exclusive series for Project Times and seven of these articles are live so far and several more are due to go live shortly. Contact me. Great opportunity to get the word out there about what you have developed and how good it is for everyone to use. Contact me. You won't regret it - I guarantee it.