SharePoint for Project Management

Chapter 4. Adding Stakeholders to the PMIS

Poor communication is probably the single most significant contributor to project failure.

—Lois Zells, Managing Software Projects (Wiley, 1990)

Good two-way communication between all project stakeholders is key to project success. Solid project communication forestalls surprises, prevents duplication of efforts, and helps the project manager and the team reveal omissions and misallocation of resources early enough to permit corrections.

The question is, as a project manager, how can you ensure that only relevant project information goes out to the appropriate stakeholders?

If members of the executive management team on your project don’t care about detailed project information, but they are interested in having updates about milestone-level project status, high-level budget information, and overall project health, how do you ensure they receive that information in a timely fashion? On the other end of the spectrum, the project team is more likely to be interested in the project details specific to what they are working on, as well as what affects them. Again, how do you ensure they receive timely and relevant project information?

Project Communications Plan

Creating the project communications plan is an important step in sound project planning. The communications plan facilitates effective and efficient communications with all project stakeholders, describing how project communications will occur while project work is being done. A good communications ...