Project Communication Management

According to the PMBOK Guide, “most communication skills are common for both general management and project management, such as, but not limited to:

• Listening actively and effectively
• Questioning and probing ideas and situations to ensure a better understanding
• Educating to increase the team’s knowledge so that they can be more effective
• Fact-finding to identify or confirm information
• Setting and managing expectations
• Persuading a person, a team, or an organisation to perform an action
• Motivating to provide encouragement or reassurance
• Coaching to improve performance and achieve desired results
• Negotiating to achieve mutually acceptable agreements between parties
• Resolving conflict to prevent disruptive situations
• Summarising, recapping, and identifying the next steps.”

Challenges during a project

The size of the problems you face often comes down to how well you have planned and how quickly you identified and responded to issues that did come up. No amount of planning can account for the truly unexpected, so there is always a chance that things will go wrong.

You are bound to face many challenges as a project manager, so it is vital that your problem-solving skills are sharp and that you remain ready to think on your feet to avoid bigger problems down the line, wherever necessary.

Communication issues

It is easy to avoid communicating with your stakeholders when there is a problem or conflict. Avoiding the issues is a mistake.

Example

You might have had a major supplier go out of business, and you need to implement risk management into your plans. Perhaps a key milestone has been severely delayed, setting the project back by weeks or months.

Whatever the issue, avoiding communicating with your client about the problem is the worst thing you could do.

Failure to communicate is a poor business practice and a sign of managerial neglect. Clear and up-front communication regarding issues is the surest way to avoid an upset and disappointed client.

You should let them know:

1. What are you doing to fix the problem
2. Any impact it has on future milestones
3. The impact it has on milestones and key dates

Problem-solving project issues

In project management, there are bound to be obstacles along the path to success, and it is up to you to get things back on track by promptly addressing any issues that arise. To effectively address project issues, however, you must first understand them.

According to the Project Management Institute, ineffective communication accounts for one-third of all project failures.

It may also be helpful to divide your issues into categories, namely:

• Major problems - problems that could slow down progress or its successful completion
• Opportunities - problems that are not critical as they offer unforseen opportunities
• Concerns - problems that are not exactly problems but must be monitored in case they develop into problems
• Situational issues - problems that might either be a concern or a major problem but develop from a situational standpoint

As PM, you should have the skill to apply a standard solution development and implementation process to every information/communication system issue, such as a standard problem-solving process.

In whatever way you have categorised the issue, you should be able to employ the following systematic five-step process:

Project control issues

Strategic communication planning is the most significant issue control tool in your arsenal. However, it may also help to consider the following issue control techniques:

Embrace technology	Make the most of streamlining and automating information management and communication technologies, such as video-conferencing, cloud-based editing and storage, and digital project management tools.
Issue log	Log all issues so that what you learn can help to improve future projects.
Risk register	Keep a risk register to monitor risks and stop them before they become threats.
User training	Ensure all staff are trained in using information and communication systems to their full potential.
Compatibility	Use a single set of digital tools throughout the organisation to ensure compatibility.
Buy-in	Create employee buy-in over the usefulness of digital tools.
Dynamics	Encourage meetings and collaboration to keep in-person communications flowing and dynamic.
Skills development	Communicate better and teach your team how to communicate better too.
Coaching and mentoring	Coach your team members if you feel that they require a personalised approach to gaining communication confidence and tool proficiency.
Social media	Provide a more casual employee chatline like Slack or a WhatsApp group so that employees can feel more connected on a personal level. This will improve communication dynamics.
Guidance	Follow organisational policies and procedures regarding information management and communication.
Checking resources	Review and gather feedback regularly in case you need to assign more or different resources.
System review	Review and gather feedback and, if it is found to be necessary, trial and implement alternative information management and communication systems/apps/tools.

How to use an issue log

The issue log is one of those information and communication requirements that is not confined to a project phase but is ongoing throughout the project lifespan. It is your responsibility to set it up and ensure that it gets used as intended.

An issue log spreadsheet will track each roadblock or unplanned impact on your project’s performance or timeline (including all information and communication system issues). It should be added as soon as a problem is identified, as you will use it to monitor issues before and after implementing your solution.

Issues should be listed as either open or closed but should never be removed from the list because you will also use the list to monitor the effectiveness of your chosen solution and to support performance progress.

The decisions made and the impacts and outcomes observed here will inform you and your organisation’s work on all future projects.

Follow this process when logging all project issues:

PM tools often come equipped with log streamlining functions such as:

One-click issue reporting, updating and assigning
The ability to generate useful analytics, Gantt charts and diagrams that format your issue log data to make it more accessible/readable to yourself and anyone assigned to the issue

Your issue log should include fields for:

• Issue Number
• Status
• Issue Description
• Category
• Priority
• Assigned to
• Raised by
• Date raised
• Logged by
• Impact
• Actions
• Expected resolution date
• Final resolution
• Comments

Once the project is complete, analyse your issue log and project data to create, and document lessons learned and offer suggestions for improving and avoiding these issues on future projects.

Watch

Watch the YouTube 7 Issue Management Tips – Project Management Training to learn more about issue management.

How to manage project risks

Your objective should always be the early identification of risks that could negatively impact the team’s ability to achieve the project’s goals if they become active threats or issues.

Follow this process to manage risks:

Risk Register

A comprehensive project risk register helps to manage risks as they arise. This dynamic document, like the issue log, should be created during the project’s initial phase and used throughout the project lifecycle.

This register is also known as a risk log. The risk register is similar to an issue register, except the risk register highlights potential issues that could threaten the project’s success. The issue register logs actual matters as they occur.

A risk register is best created with the help of a digital or online tool such as a spreadsheet or project management software because this allows for easy updates, calculations, distribution, storage and implementation of any necessary security measures.

The risk register should be accessible to all because it monitors risks and ensures they stay in check.

Most PM systems will offer risk management solutions.

As a project manager, you must manage and control communications throughout the project lifespan by ensuring timeliness, clarity, appropriateness, professionalism, alignment and productivity of communication flow to and from all stakeholders.

You must:

• Monitor and control all communication channels to ensure that there is no miscommunication.
• Not attempt to control all communications as this would be counterproductive micromanagement. Instead, monitor and control the flow, topic and direction.
• Ensure that all stakeholders get the information they need when needed, in the methods required and suitable to all parties.
• Create and apply all required project management communications (called control communications), including performance feedback reports, progress on schedule, issue logs, risk registers and including internal, formal, official, oral and vertical reports.

Benefits of holding project meetings

There is a certain art to holding an effective project meeting. It is the project manager’s duty to control communications during all project meetings.

This can be done by:

• Scheduling and confirming in advance
• Determining and communicating the meeting purpose and agenda in advance
• Assigning meeting roles and informing each assignee well in advance
• Setting a time limit and sticking to it
• Keeping team members pointed in the right direction throughout but not controlling their every move that slides idly inviting relevant staff to the meeting
• Ensuring that any action items assigned in the meeting and documented in the meeting minutes and agreeing on which document will then be formatted and published.

Action Items

Action items form an intrinsic part of your communication control during and after meetings. By using a system that contains clear action items and designated action owners or assignees, you will have organised your team, prepared them to carry out the tasks and strategically expedited the process of project goal achievement.

Action items can be simple, such as sending an e-mail, or complex, like compiling a detailed Gantt chart for an aspect of your project. Either way, they must be documented in the meeting minutes and released to all attendees so that everyone knows what is on their to-do list after the meeting.

Each action item must include the following components:

When properly documented and released, action items create a means towards full accountability. Everyone knows what everyone else was meant to do and by when they were meant to do it. If using a digital project management system, convert action items into an assigned to-do list in your project management system directly after the meeting.

Example

When you turn action items into tasks to be completed (or to-dos) in Wrike, for example, the system sends out e-mails to each respective user, notifying them of every task to which they are assigned, including due dates, context, comments and all other details that you have loaded into the system.

Agile Project Meetings

Agile projects follow somewhat alternative PM principles. They focus not on traditional project milestones and requirements but on iterative development in short frames of work that provide regular pauses for reflection but still manage to cut down on any time wastage.

Agile project management champions velocity, efficiency and the flexibility to change, as you can make small but highly effective adjustments based on your review of each iteration’s results without being nailed to the stipulations of an unwavering plan.

Several PM methodologies fall within the realm of Agile, and any given Agile team will be managed within one or the other option. Kanban and Scrum are two of the most popular options. You can differentiate them as follows:

Scrum	Kanban
This process uses sprints, which is set intervals of work where members of a team work within a limited, but specified timeframe. After, they evaluate their work output and processes at the end the iteration. They can then plan the necessary adjustments to be included in the next sprint.	Focuses on reducing the time it takes to work a project (called a story) from start to finish. This is done using the Kanban Board (a simple workflow visualisation tool) and by continuously improving work flow.

Kanban and Scrum tools and analytics are available through the most widely used project management systems, either embedded or as third-party integrations.

Now, Agile and arguably the simplest and most popular methodology under its umbrella, Scrum, has the effect of increasing the pace of work, enhancing dynamics and maximising goal success. It offers a sense of achievement, positive feedback, and ownership of work completed within a team environment.

This accountability or ownership begins in Agile meetings, many of which are not attended by leaders like yourself.

Some examples of meetings that operate under the scrum framework include:

Stand-up meetings	These are scheduled daily within the scrum framework and are highly focused five to fifteen-minute events or ceremonies that drive the spirit of efficiency and accountability, reviewing progress on sprints and identifying roadblocks. These are attended by the project team, with no leadership present. These are also an aspect of the Kanban framework.
Sprint planning meetings	Project meetings have their agile counterpart in the Scrum sprint planning meeting that occurs for two hours every week on the sprint. In other words, two-week sprints would start with a four-hour sprint planning session, and so on. Attendees include the Scrum master, who ensures the absence of obstacles and adherence to the Agile principles; the product owner, who oversees the product or output of the project development team; and the team itself. Here, sprint objectives will be decided on, and action items or tasks will be divided among the team. In other words, this is where team members become accountable.
Sprint review and sprint retrospective meetings	Read the article A guide to managing agile meetings by Kat Boogaard, Wrike, to learn how to hold agile meetings.

Transparent communication channels with project stakeholders

One of a PM's most fundamental duties is maintaining open communication channels through the network of stakeholders who are invested in the project.

Stakeholders are involved in every aspect of the project based on their authority level, responsibility, and stake in the matter.

They communicate to bring the project to a successful conclusion. When a problem cannot be solved within one entity, other stakeholders must be brought into the fold. This is why the network is so important.

It is your responsibility to maintain this communication web by:

• Managing the creation and movement of all required documentation
• Reporting according to the plan
• Updating and exchanging data upward, downward and diagonally on a regular basis
• Overseeing the flow of data
• Providing accessible and effective technological platforms for various types of project communication, information access and data exchange
• Providing these communication tools to all stakeholders along with required user training and whatever additional assistance is necessary

Just remember, information and communication technology enables more effective stakeholder communications, as does a keen awareness and consideration for cultural differences and diverse communication needs.

The negative impacts of poor stakeholder communications include the following:

TEAM	OTHER STAKEHOLDERS
Misunderstandings around objectives and goals Conflicts Unaligned team members Failure to meet deadlines Low productivity raising time-expenditure and then blowing the budget Lack of commitment to the project	Lack of or limits to buy-in Conflicts between stakeholder groups or stakeholders and team Stakeholders working against the team or against the progress Misunderstandings about project success and false expectations Project failure

Frequently, on more complex projects, you will need to delegate responsibility for certain stakeholder communications to certain team members. Just ensure that you delegate wisely to trained and trusted personnel who know the stakeholder communication requirements and can apply chosen communication media at a professional level.

Whether you or your delegates are engaging in stakeholder communications, you will need to ensure that, per your communication plan, you continue to communicate with your stakeholders and facilitate stakeholder buy-in as the project progresses.

1	Plan communications and involve your stakeholders in the planning process	They must contribute to defining communications and information management arrangements for the project, as each stakeholder knows their own requirements and the requirements of their job role.
2	Improve the effectiveness of communications, including frequency and quality	You can do this by inviting stakeholder feedback on effectiveness and issues related to communication tools and processes. This must be done in a timely enough manner to facilitate modifications before the project outcomes get affected.
3	Ensure transparency and accessibility to all pertinent project information	Do this by centralising and streamlining the input, storage, sharing, updating, retrieval and management of information and communication items through digital means.
4	Involve stakeholders in communications	Enabling more effective two-way communications Through communication training Streamlining communication technologies, videoconferencing, project management software and cloud-based tools
5	Promptly report issues to relevant stakeholders

Project status reports

During a project, you must ensure the delivery of project status reports to relevant stakeholders at regular intervals. Your communication plan should have outlined when and how the project status reports will be created and delivered. Project reporting is vital to controlling communications, and you must ensure it is done with skill.

Some of the key benefits of planning regular status reports throughout a project include:

1. Ensure transparent information about the project for all stakeholders at planned intervals
2. Enabling buy-in to the project by communicating detailed project information to stakeholders
3. Help to identify issues and risks
4. Provide a gauge of project health
5. Prevent scope creep (the requirements increase over the project’s lifecycle).

A project status report provides a detailed summary of how the project is tracking against the project plan. The key purpose of a status report is to keep stakeholders informed, call attention to any issues before they arise, and confirm that all tasks are on track for completion within the projected timeframe.

The following aspects should be included in a status report:

• The details of the project, including the name, number or description of the project
• The names and roles of the project manager and team members
• The date of the report
• The schedule of the project
• Whether or not all the milestones have been met for the period
• Whether the project has remained in scope for the period
• Whether there ahas been scope creep
• Whether or not the project is on budget
• An update on task completion
• Whether or not there are any tasks that cannot be commenced or completed due to other tasks (dependencies)
• Quality assurance outcomes (more about this later)
• An overview of risks
• Any issues and roadblocks that have come up during the period
• How roadblocks, if any, are being dealt with.

How to create a status report

As a project manager, your digital PM platform will be your biggest asset when creating status reports. Learning how to use the advanced analytics and customisable settings of the system of your choice will be instrumental in equipping you with accessible, easy-to-share real-time data.

It may be that your organisation will issue a template on which to base your report and into which you must import the data you need from the project management system or alternative analytics source. It may be that a status report template within the software can be customised to suit your requirements and then shared directly with relevant stakeholders.

Either way, you must ensure that the information you provide in the report is up-to-date and accurate when you provide it.

Reports:

• Must be timely and regular
• Must not add an extra workload that may hinder optimal project progress
• Must be appropriately formatted, channelled or delivered to the audience
• If to team members, it may be more informal and more detailed than those for key stakeholders such as the project sponsor
• If to key stakeholders and upper-level personnel, require higher levels of summary, focused on clarifying key points in preferably less than one page or half an hour of a presentation
• Must identify issues
• Must warn of pending problems
• Must be easy to understand
• Must allow for feedback, queries, questions and requests from stakeholders

Quality management involves overseeing all activities and tasks required to maintain a desired level of success. It ensures that a project, product or service meets expected quality and consistency standards.

A quality management system typically includes the following four components:

Quality planning

Quality planning considers the defined project scope and specifies the acceptance criteria that will be used to validate whether project outputs meet the quality standards of the project sponsor/client. It is focused on the specific project outputs to allow for quality control at the beginning of the project.

As a PM, it is your responsibility to:

• Determine specific stakeholder quality requirements and consider how best to meet them
• Determine methods to measure achievement against the quality plan at key milestones through the project (acceptance criteria for deliverables)
• Determine the policies and procedures relevant to the project for both project deliverables and project processes
• Define who is responsible for what
• Define the parameters of information, documents and communication compliance to all people that you supervise.

Quality assurance

Quality assurance (QA) monitors and verifies that acceptable and sufficient processes are being used to develop the deliverables and that these processes are functional. It is a process as well as a proactive and preventative tool that must be completed before you can begin to inspect the deliverables themselves (in quality control).

PMs must create performance measures to identify project performance statuses and concerns at regular intervals during the project lifecycle and to ensure that things are proceeding according to plan.

This is done by collecting information from teams via methods such as PM system user input or via feedback to track the actual project performance against the plan. Issues detected will often shed light on areas of process or procedure that are invalid.

Examples of monitoring systems include but are not limited to:

By assuring stakeholders that your processes are valid, you provide them with confidence that their quality requirements will be met not only by deliverables but also by the final product. In this way, QA allows for early error detection while maintaining stakeholder support and communication, making it a vital component of control communications.

Whether your deliverables are actual material products or not, the areas to validate will include the methods and tools you apply along the way. However, it will also include all information, data, and communication used to create your deliverables.

According to Theresa Pojuner in an article titled “Validating Information,” you can use the following ways to validate data and methods.

• Test the data or methods appropriately, perhaps usability testing or case modelling
• Ensure ownership of the information collected and that you have the right to utilise any gathered data
• Where appropriate, ask trusted personnel for second judgments on the data or methods
• Ensure that you monitor all validation processes to ensure their accuracy and comprehensiveness
• For dynamic data, hold meetings with key personnel to establish and authenticate the information shortly before your status report
• For data received from others, ensure the clarity of your data request, whether you explained it in full, whether you stipulated a format, etc.
• Consult your organisational policies and procedures for requirements around validation
• Partner with relevant experts to ensure the validation and accuracy of information
• Engage with other internal managers to learn about their authentication procedures
• Ensure that the data is relevant and not just making for unnecessary work, dead ends or loops
• Ensure that gathered data is well organised by yourself, your team and your information management system, as this will allow you to work effectively to deliver the objective
• Ensure that proper training is provided and methods are applied as intended

Validation information can be received in many forms, including:

Verbal feedback from employees (formal or informal)
Written feedback from employees (formal or informal)
Formal reports
Sampling
External feedback: audits, industry bodies, government entities etc.

Example

Another project manager, Heather, at CBSA is completing a major internal project comprising the implementation of a new customer relationship management (CRM) system. This involves transferring data from many manual spreadsheets and paper-based systems into an online, centralised format.

At the project kick-off meeting, Heather assigns a range of tasks, including importing data, communicating with staff and training staff on the new system. If Heather had assigned these tasks and assumed everything to be accurate just because the project team had marked them off as complete, she would encounter problems down the road.

Heather schedules quality assurance validation tasks into the project plan from the outset. This includes the data being validated by a different person from the one who originally imported it, another person checking the training plans before staff training is delivered, and validating the staff communication plans.

Quality control

Quality control (QC) concerns inspecting and testing the outcomes/deliverables, intending to ensure that no problems are transferred to the client or sponsor upon delivery.

Key points

QC is a vital communication control, ensuring everything is within the project’s scope.

Scope validation

At project closure, you must evaluate (inspect, measure, test) your outcomes to ensure they meet the acceptance criteria specified under quality planning.

You will do this with the help of:

1. Key quality metrics, as discussed in previous sections
2. Your quality criteria checklist
3. Information from your project management plan
4. Work performance data
5. Verified deliverables
6. Validated changes
7. Change requests

This is also a vital communication control, as it ensures that everything done and submitted remains within the project’s scope. However, before information and communication products can be delivered and signed off at scope validation, you must ensure that they are correct, authenticated and authorised for release to the project sponsor.

Should you identify any fault in those decisions, processes, and procedures, you must develop solutions that you can apply during future projects and/or submit formally to your stakeholders with your final project quality report.

These solutions will serve as suggestions on how to do things more effectively during future projects and are an aspect of your continuous quality improvement efforts.

Quality improvement

You have already been introduced to quality improvement as a primary purpose for conducting your quality control review of all outcomes. However, this was only discussed in terms of making and suggesting improvements for application on future projects.

Throughout the phases of your project lifespan, you will be required to monitor and evaluate your information systems and communication processes, as well as your management thereof, so that adjustments can be made during the current project. As mentioned before, you will need to do this on-the-go, and at the end of each phase.

How to evaluate communication processes

Consider the following factors, all of which should have been highlighted in your communication plan:

Communication objectives	Were they met?
Target audience	Were they reached?
Purpose of communication for each audience	Was it fulfilled?
Content/artefacts for the communication	Were they well received?
Information sources for the content	Were they valid and authorised?
Communication method	Did it meet audience and subject needs and requirements?
Communication frequency	Was it sufficient?
Responsible communicators	Were they effective, clear, empathic, active listeners and skilled communicators?
Communication resources	Were they enough, and were they properly utilised?

These questions can be asked during the lifecycle of the project as well as after it because quality improvement is a continuous process. Gather feedback and data around completeness, accuracy, timing, volume and more, and consider using some of the following methods:

Verbal feedback	For small or single-person exchanges, ask for feedback at the end of the discussion and take notes. This way, you can ensure that the next exchange is more productive.
Meeting evaluation forms	Hand them out to participants at the end of the meeting, but keep them brief. Alternatively, do this immediately after the meeting via e-mail or another messaging medium.
Engagement profiles	This technique is used to measure the effectiveness of your overall communication plan and involves assessing the gap between each stakeholder's current and target attitude.
Forums	Forums such as retrospective meetings or dedicated social media or PM platform channels are good mediums for channelling feedback from your team about the overall communication plan.

Other questions to answer when evaluating project communication processes include:

Personnel communication	Document exchange	Meetings
Who talked to whom? How often? When? Which chat and messaging media were used for lateral discussion? Which form of media was used for horizontal and diagonal discussion? Who had problems with this media? Did you get to the root of the problems and fix them?	Who got which documents? In what form? How were the specific needs of individuals addressed? Were digital document exchange platforms adopted by all? Did everyone understand how to use and edit files on the cloud? Was reporting timely and comprehensive? Were stakeholders satisfied?	Were they timely and frequent enough? did everyone attend?  Were goals, objectives and tasks effectively communicated and acted upon? Did your processes properly facilitate collaborative communication? Did this reflect on the team’s work?

Once you have learned what worked and what did not (or what is working and what is not), you can gather the necessary approvals, implement updates and solutions to improve the quality of communication processes and adjust the plan for the next sprint, iteration or phase.

Just ensure that you record and document all findings, investigation of causes and summary of improvement actions implemented (or suggestions for improvements to be implemented during future phases and/or future projects) and include these in your quality report along with an action plan.

Then, monitor the success of any improvement actions implemented by the same measures outlined above.

Benefits of evaluating information management systems

When evaluating your information management systems, the same approach is recommended: ask pertinent questions, investigate causes, and report with suggestions for improvements in your quality report. Naturally, however, the questions will differ.

The following gives you a good idea of the questions you should be asking at the necessary stages.

Objectives	Is the IMS a streamlining or hindering factor in goal achievement?
Tasks	Are tasks easily allocated and managed by all stakeholders? Are stakeholders able to see how tasks relate to overall goals? Are WBS, Gantt and other systems incorporated? Is there adequate integration with the other tools and apps for project work and communication?
Resources	Is the Information Management System (IMS) costly to maintain? Is the IMS helping you save money? How does the IMS impact resource management? Does the IMS provide tools to manage resource allocation?
Document management	Do document exchange, privacy and storage facilities meet organisational and legislative requirements? Are documents easy for relevant stakeholders to input, share and retrieve? Are there any problems around incompatible file formats between apps and stakeholders anywhere on your system? Is there secure, unlimited storage? Does the IMS offer version control functionality? Are resources being wasted on document management issues?
Planning	Are WBS structures supported? Are planning systems included in your PM methodology? Are dependencies supported? How well are backlog and priority management supported?
Scheduling	Does the IMS assist stakeholders in prioritising and meeting their due dates? Does the IMS streamline the scheduling of tasks? Does it streamline the scheduling of meetings?
Monitoring, analysis, and estimation	Does the IMS allow you and other stakeholders to monitor progress with ease? Does the IMS offer detailed and overall analytics and estimation support?
Reporting	Can you make project notes and generate or write formal reports on the IMS? Is there support for automatic reporting? Are report templates provided? Are built-in analytics useful in reporting? Do all stakeholders make use of the in-built reporting features?

As you have seen, many areas need to be covered and factors to consider when evaluating the effectiveness and integrity of your information system. The questions above are just the tip of the iceberg, and it is up to you to discern what you need to ask in light of your unique system, projects and stakeholders.

How to maintain information and communication systems

“A Project Management Information System (PMIS) is an information system consisting of the tools and techniques used to gather, integrate, and disseminate the outputs of project management processes. It supports all aspects of the project from initiating through closing and can include both manual and automated systems.”

“An information management system (IMS) provides a set of standard tools for the project manager to capture, store, and distribute information to stakeholders about the project’s costs, schedule progress, and performance.” - As defined in the PMBOK guide.

Given the pace of information and communication system development, there is a good chance that your PMIS and IMS are the same or, at least, a closely integrated system of complementary tools that seamlessly link you and your stakeholders to each other and everything required in terms of information and communication management. If not, enabling this cohesive system should be one of your continuous quality improvement goals.

Having discussed implementation and deployment earlier in this Learner Guide, let us focus now on maintaining your project management information system.

Questions that should be asked on a regular basis include:

System admin	Are utilities provided for monitoring and administering the system? Are these utilities regularly used?
System updates	Are PMIS updates automatic (such as with online PMIS’) or are you responsible for installing updates when new versions get released? Can the system be set to update automatically? (Recommended for all users unless using a web-based PMIS)
System and Data Security	Have you researched security risk monitoring and management for your PMIS? Can you integrate with SIEM systems and CASB so that you can spot unusual activity? Do you regularly update your passwords and ensure authentication for all users?
Storage	How much storage do you and your users have? Do you need to buy more? Are there unlimited storage options? Do you regularly purge obsolete data and unneeded backup files to free up space?
New Features and Refresher Training	Are you engaging in regular refresher user training sessions, especially when new features are released?
Communication channels	Are chatlines and project discussion boards being used for purposes other than intended or do you need to send out a memo to your team?

How to evaluate the outcomes of management decisions

Intrinsic to your own development and to the project and organisation’s quality improvement process is your evaluation of the outcomes of your decisions to identify any room for improvement.

Utilising a variety of sources such as stakeholder feedback, analytics, project records and more, you should ask and answer questions such as:

As you can imagine, the list goes on, which is why questions like these should be asked on a regular basis; just focus on one area of management at a time, ensuring that you have evaluated all areas by the end of each cycle so that improvements can be implemented before the next cycle begins. This is key to your role as a project manager.

The PMBOK Guide describes communications management as:

“The process of creating, collecting, distributing, storing, retrieving and the ultimate disposition of project information in accordance with the communications management plan.”

Records management involves creating, directing, and controlling all documents pertaining to and involved in the project lifespan.

With the help of a powerful administrative system, such as digital project management software integrated with relevant third-party apps and tools, you can enjoy streamlined development, versioning, filing, storing and retrieving records.

In this way, you can also ensure that all documents are used according to plan and as outlined by legislative and organisational requirements.

You will quickly find that skilled records management is the perfect foundation for managing all project activities and linking teams. However, you must remember that all project files should be created, shared and kept according to your organisational file management policies and procedures.

According to Eric Mcconnell in an article titled “Project Records Management in Three Essential Steps,” you should include the following when filing project documents:

• Official correspondence, including e-mails, letters, attachments and images
• Project meeting minutes and generated papers
• Project request, proposal and brief
• Stakeholder contact details
• Change and variance requests 
• Project diary, including day-to-day project progress and events
• Issue logs/risk logs/decisions made
• Status reports and summaries
• Procurement documents
• Team guidelines, instructions, notes and memos
• Handover/closure of documents

Version control

Ensure that each file is stored as a separate unit when filing project records and that you use some sort of indexing and version control tool. Most popular PMIS has these functions embedded, but you will sometimes need to ensure that they are switched on and applied to your specifications.

Version control should also be incorporated into your naming conventions to ensure that the next person to read, share or edit the document does not waste time or cause chaos by using an old version of the file. When naming, include:

• A revision number
• A revision date
• Author name(s)
• Editor name(s)
• Where applicable, a link to electronic copies

Where to document outputs and process closure

Use the following summary checklist for managing documents at process closure:

1. Ensure that all deliverables have been handed off and signed by stakeholders. Sign-off is how you confirm the approval of each and every stakeholder.
2. All outstanding contracts and agreements with vendors and other contractors, as well as other outstanding documents, must be signed by the appropriate persons.
3. Collect all documents, including all project reports and essentials, included in the table below.
4. Use these records to identify and document all lessons learned throughout the life of the project, including any feedback from stakeholders, so that mistakes can be avoided and improvements made on future projects.
5. Archive these records according to procedural guidelines so they can be used as a historical reference during continuous improvement work.
6. Follow organisational file management policy to ensure correct transfer of project information ownership and control.

Essential documents to be archived and transferred include:

Document type	Description	Management tips
Project records	These include your raw project data, including memos, work package definitions, directions, procurement orders, invoices and product specifications.	These should be gathered, categorised, and saved to enable the project stakeholders to use them at any stage of the project and thereafter.
Project archives	These contain a complete set of indexed project records and, as listed earlier in this section, include all official documents about the project throughout its lifespan.	All information collected is saved in files and/or electronic databases. IT devices and applications supply useful tools for project records storage and management. Electronic archives will include a central database that may be related to other databases such as procurement management, human resources management, accounting and more.
Project closure	These documents will confirm that the project has met all sponsor requirements. The sponsor approves that they formally accept the project results and deliverables and are completed to their satisfaction.	These documents may include regulation approvals, standards approvals, internal and external test results, integration and final acceptance test results.
Lessons learned	These include documents analysing the causes of variances, the reasoning behind the chosen corrective actions and other inferences and conclusions regarding the project. Lessons learned are all about gaining knowledge and evolving through project communication.	These must be documented and stored in project databases to enable continuous quality improvement and knowledge development.