Communicatioon in a Project Importance of Communication

¶ … Communicatioon in a Project

Importance of Communication in a Project

Effective communication is the key component for successful implementation of any project. The root cause of the project failure is that there is no integration of communication plan in the project lifecycle. Communication is a vital way to manage a project. Depending on the type of project, a project manager needs to plan the method to implement effective communication in advanced before a project starts. Typically, effective communication platform minimizes the project risks, and the failure to implement effective communication in a project could serve as a threat to the success of a project.

The objective of this report is to discuss the importance of a communication within a project. The paper demonstrates the importance of communication in the Personnel, Payroll, and Related Systems (PPARS) project.

Overview of PPARS project

The origins of the PPARS was dated back in 1995, when it was envisage that there was a need to adopt decentralized personnel and payroll system. Formally, the personnel and payroll system was adopted manually and processed centrally. In addition, each health statutory board was responsible for its human resources management. The results of the method led to cost escalation, human resources efficiency and employee turnover. The PPARS project was initiated to address these shortcomings. However, the PPARS met with some problems because the project stakeholders did not envisage the importance of communication to the success of a project. (Health Service Executive 2005).

Importance of Communication to a Project

"A project is an organization of people dedicated to a specific purpose or objective." (Pinto & Slevin, 2007 pp 168).Generally, a project may incur large amount of money that needs to be undertaking at a specific time with some expected level of performances. "At a minimum, all projects need to have well defined objectives and sufficient resources to carry out all the required tasks." (Pinto & Slevin, 2007 pp 169). One of the resources for the implementation of a project is to employ project communication.

Project communication is the exchange of project related information between a sender and a receiver. The success of a project depends on the method the stakeholders carry out the effective communication in a project lifecycle. The project team needs to provide timely and accurate information to the project team member to meet the needs of the stakeholders. Project communication is the responsibility of everyone within a project and the project manager is responsible to develop project communication plan to meet the needs of the project objective.

To enhance greater understanding on the importance of communication to the success of a project, the report demonstrates the importance of communication in the Personnel, Payroll, and Related Systems (PPARS) project.

Importance of Communication to PPARS Project

The vision of the PPARS is to develop the decentralized Human Resources (HR) and the payroll system for health service system (HSE). The project management envisages devolvement of decentralization of personnel administration into line management. Despite the anticipation of the project stakeholders, there are shortcomings identified with the project leading to cost escalation and time slippage. One of the overall problems of the project is that the project stakeholders did not envisage the importance of communication in the project. Thus, they did not integrate effective communication plan before the implementation of the projects.

To address these shortcomings, the stakeholders decided to review the overall project to identify the method to improve on the project. From the results of the review, there were several problem identified with the project:

First, there was absence of structured communication plan and communication platform among the project team member to reveal the clear vision of the project. In addition, there was no effective method to communicate the business requirements to the stakeholders in accordance with the best practice. There was also no governance structure to manage accountability and responsibility, and the project was run in the environment where there was inadequacy levers and deficit in authority at various stage of project lifecycle. (Health Service Executive 2005). With the identification of the problems, there was a consensus to review the project, and provide key changes in the project.

Strategies to Enforce Key Change Management

The strategies to enforce key change management to achieve success in the PPARS project are as follows:

First, the changes suggest that there is a need to enforce honest and clear communication among the project team member. The communication plan should provide greater understanding on the PPARS vision, the major reason of the changes imperative, and the reason for the implementation.

Moreover, there should be a direct communication to everyone to have impact on the change process of the project. The senior management must demonstrate effective communication through words, behavior and commitment to project change process.

It is also recommended that there is a need to incorporate regular checkpoints for feedback in the communication plan. The regular checkpoint would involve the monitoring team that would communicate the progress of the project to the appropriate authority. The monitoring team would also oversee the quality of the project.

Additional key change management to enhance the success of the project is to develop the effective information system that would enhance efficient management of the human resources. In the health service, human resources are very important for the success of any project. Effective management of human resources contributes to the organization, and the major tool that enhances effective HR management is to enhance effective communication of the human resources. Information system has been identified as an effective tool that could enhance communication efficiency of the HR. The manual system that was incorporated into the formal project has led to the escalation of the project costs. By incorporating sophisticated information system, the PPARS project will develop efficient and effectively human resources management. Using effective information system to enhance communication will make the PPARS project to efficiently manage the financial affairs of the project.

The structural method to enhance effective communication is to equip human resources with effective training. In the PPARS project, the communication system adopted was largely one-way communication and there was lack of job satisfaction among employees, which largely led to high rate of turnover. It is revealed that high rate of turnover largely militates against effective communication. Thus, implementation of effective training for the human resources is suggested to enhance effective communication among the human resources.