Project Communications: All Creativity, All the Time!

Project Communications: All Creativity, All the Time!

Andy Jordan

– February 18, 2020

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at andy.jordan@roffensian.com. Andy’s new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

So here I am as a project manager communicating through the medium of a ProjectManagement.com article with other project managers—and I am writing an article about creativity in project communications. No pressure to make this an interesting piece then!

Over the years, I have done a lot of very different things in my articles. A poem, a fair few attempts at humor, some channeling of my inner Rudyard Kipling, and quotes from everyone from Henry Ford to my mom. And hopefully a few insights that have actually helped you grow as project managers.

I use these different techniques to try and make my message more memorable—to grab your attention for the few minutes it takes to read a piece that I’ve written, and then help you to remember the key points after the fact. And that’s pretty much the same thing that you are trying to do when you are communicating information about your project. You want to get as much information as possible across to people in a way that they can consume, understand and, where necessary, act upon.

You only have a limited opportunity to do that (a meeting, a status report, etc.), and you are dealing with the significant risk that the consumers of your communication will disengage because of familiarity—they attend an update meeting or receive a status report every week, and assume consistency or sameness.

Anything …

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Published at Tue, 18 Feb 2020 05:00:00 +0000