SharePoint 2010 for Project Management, 2nd Edition

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. This 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 plan generally includes the following elements:

• Communication objectives

• Targeted project stakeholders

• Key communications format and content

• Communication methods and frequency

Checklist: Considerations for Project Communications Plan

• How many people are involved with the project? Where are they located?

• Are all internal and external communications needs defined for the project?

• Is all pertinent stakeholder information available?

• Have we defined project roles and responsibilities?

• What communications technologies will be used?

• What is the availability of technology on this project?

• Is there an electronic project information repository?

• Are all required deliverable formats defined and available?

• Is the communications plan aligned with the project size and complexity?

Why is having a project communications plan necessary? Because part of setting up a PMIS is defining who has access to that PMIS and the level of access that they can have. Table 4-1 summarizes the communication needs of the SharePoint Dojo project.

Table 4-1. SharePoint Dojo project communications requirements

Stakeholder	Project information requirements
Chief executive officer	Regular email updates on project milestones and risks
Chief financial officer	Access to project budget information, and the ability to review and update any change to project finances
Chief compliance officer	Ability to monitor project process compliance, as well as to review and update project risks
Program manager	Ability to review project tasks, milestones, and risks
Other project managers	Ability to review and update project information from other teams to share lessons learned and satisfy continuous improvement process

Knowing which pieces of information are required by different stakeholders will help you create appropriate levels of information access and appropriate methods of delivery. For example, you wouldn’t expect the CEO to regularly check the PMIS for updates; he wants the updates sent via email on a regularly scheduled basis. You can configure the PMIS to send the relevant updates automatically. Wouldn’t that be beneficial? Instead of manually emailing status data to the CEO, you can focus on more important aspects of your project. To learn how to set up automated alerts, see the section Subscribing to Alerts in Chapter 7.