Project Communications?!

    Project communications provides the critical links among the project stakeholders and the ideas and concepts encompassing the project. Project communications management evolves from an understanding that the timing, form, scope, audience, and other elements involved in the communication process can have a substantial impact on a project's success. Controlling these factors, and hence their resulting project influence, is very much at the heart of successful project leadership. According to the PMI (Project Management Communications), project communications consists of these four interacting processes: 

	COMMUNICATION PLANNING: The act of deciding the communication needs of the project's stakeholders and determining the form in which it will be disseminated.
	INFORMATION DISTRIBUTION: The act of making project information available in a timely manner to project stakeholders.
	REPORTING: The act of collecting and disseminating project status and performance information.
	CLOSURE: The act of collecting, organizing, and disseminating final project, or project phase information, for stakeholder review.

   During most project planning phases, you'll often identify key communication requirements as an outcome of other project planning tasks. For example, both the mode and audience of a project's routine status reporting may be determined by clearly defining the project's resource and organization plan. In addition, specific project requirements such as finance, legal, or executive communications may require formal project reporting. Also consider external communications, including industry regulatory compliance reporting or media communications. Many experts, including the PMI, recommend routinely developing a formal written communication plan as a basic project deliverable similar to the project's scope or schedule documents. The goal is to clearly identify expectations for all project stakeholders that include the who, how, when, and why project information will be disseminated. For the application development manager, ineffective project communications can negatively impact or even derail a successful project by underreporting issues and/or inappropriately releasing project status or performance goals. Contrarily, experienced project leaders can resolve issues by carefully controlling the form, content, and audience of project information.