If you’ve taken a boot camp course for the PMP certificate or even the CAPM or PgMP Certificate for that matter, you’re probably familiar with the formula for calculating communication channels: N*(N-1)/2. If you haven’t, basically what this formula means is that each time you add a person to a project, you are exponentially increasing the number of communication channels that exist for that project. This is because that one new person establishes a channel with each and every other person on the project; so if you add 1 more person to a team of 4, you go from 6 to 10 channels. Have you ever tried managing a project like this in real life? Of course not.

Communication is the most important part of project management. One of the most effective strategies in communication, however, is how you establish and manage limits on it. Completely open and unmanaged communication quickly becomes a nightmare for a project manager. Everyone has access to everyone else, information is flying everywhere, commitments are made without referencing the project management plan (PMP), and pretty soon things are happening that aren’t being tracked and you’re into one of the most dangerous areas of a project at risk: scope creep. I have personally seen customers engage technicians in order to get them to promise something outside of the scope—no one wants to be on either side of that situation.

How do we prevent this from occurring? Establishing approved lines of communication and proper representatives is key. By providing conduits through which information can be forwarded to the appropriate destinations, we are able to not only monitor communications but also maintain organization and control. One must carefully balance limits on communication. It is just as easy to create a bottleneck as it is to create a deluge of communication channels. Often, the project manager will employ a traffic manager for this very purpose. If not a dedicated person, then well-established and documented lines of communication between appropriate parties can be just as effective. Good communication is controlled communication—don’t let your channels get away from you.

Harris Eisenberg, MBA
Harris has worked in a project management role within both the marketing and music industries. Most recently, as Strategy and Business Lead for a small marketing agency in Virginia, Harris managed dozens of projects from individual brochure development to enterprise software development for the Federal government. If you wish to contact Harris, you may email him at harris.eisenberg@gmail.com.

Off Peak Training, a Reston, VA based company, offers public and private training classes to help prepare business professionals for professional certifications like the PMP®, CAPM®, PMI-SP®, CISSP®, CAPM®, CISA®, and is a Registered Education Provider for the Project Management Institute.