Speaker 1: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us again for our continued AdvisaCon webinar series. You know, it is said that communication management is the single most important project management domain. In a project, you have many players who need to ensure that the work being done is done as promised. The best way to keep everyone moving in the same direction is communication. In this webinar, we'll look at some communication strategies with a spotlight on inbound and outbound planning. Here at AdvisaCon, we help organizations achieve greater impact by leveraging work management technologies to accomplish more with less. As work management consultants and technology specialists, our focus is on streamlining processes, improving systems, and achieving better outcomes. Let's look at today's agenda. We'll talk about what is effective communication and some strategies. We'll spotlight inbound and outbound plans. We'll then look through some supporting technology tools that can help you deliver on effective communication. And then we'll bring it together in summary. A little bit about your speaker today. My name is Sean, and I have a background in math education. I do have experience in implementing Microsoft 365 as solutions for different organizations. I also have a decade's worth of experience in delivering training and instruction. I am a PMP and an MCP in Teams. And I am a self-proclaimed semi-professional dad joke teller. Here's another one for you today. What are the sweetest types of messages to receive? Communications. All right. So let's dive into what is effective communication and some strategies to go with that. A survey was taken by the Project Management Institute, and it surveyed executives and their view on how effective communication improved project delivery success. You can see on screen that there is a lift in being able to finish within budget, and it was attributed to effective communication. Same thing with on-time delivery, a much greater lift, 44% because of effective communication. There was a 28% increase in meeting original goals, again, all attributed to effective communication practices. So you can see effective communication has a lift to delivering project success. Well, what are some of those communication strategies? We'll touch a few of them just so you have some in your pocket as a result of this webinar. But we're going to touch them lightly. One strategy is to be clear, to have correct, coherent and concise messages. Communication is such a difficult topic between two people or more that you want to at least take care of the clarity of the message. Furthermore, consider the receiver of the message. What are their specific needs? What are maybe even their preferences? Do they prefer emails with long strings of paragraphs or maybe just bullet points? Also consider the receiver's culture, what might be some blockers or barriers in communication. Lastly, another strategy, monitor your communications. It's one thing to send them nicely and to consider the receiver, but adapt, reflect and adjust your communications as you learn more about the receiver, about the types of messages that are being sent and look for ways to improve your communications. When it comes to effective communication, you want to make sure you're hitting some of these goals here. One of the biggest goals of communication, especially as it comes to projects, is to satisfy stakeholders' needs. It is said that until the project deliverable has been delivered, communication is a deliverable. Think about delivering communication as a way of progressing and putting something in your stakeholders' hands and or minds that the project is moving forward. And that's the second goal, to make sure to at least have the perception that the project is moving forward by reporting accurate and timely updates, but also to actually keep the project moving forward when it comes to okay, what's the next step? What are the next things we're going to do? Next thing you want to do, eliminate any misunderstandings. When it comes to projects, the sponsor or customer had a specific goal in mind, and that is telephoned down through the project leadership, project management, and then to the project team members who actually execute on the project. So as that telephone game happens, we want to make sure to eliminate misunderstandings. How can you do that? Make sure to give it technical specifications using accurate measurements, such as numbers, times, weights, things that can be objectively verified. Also, communication is used to remove any doubts or incorrect assumptions. As mentioned before, you know, you want to satisfy your stakeholders, not only with the idea with actual deliverables, but letting them know, hey, we're moving forward, everything is going well, but of course, always truthful when doing so. Alright, so now let's talk about specifically inbound and outbound plans. When it comes to communications, you can think generally that, okay, we need to communicate something. But let's highlight the streams of where our communication is going to come from. Let's start with inbound plans. What information is needed to pull from? Think about the project team as the center, what needs to be pulled from stakeholders into, this is where the inbound comes, into the project team. For example, when it comes to creating projects and delivering, you usually want some feedback, especially as it comes to agile software development, you want that feedback from customers. Furthermore, funding, if we wanted to understand the funding boundaries, the funding availability, and timing, and then as always, whether it's inbound or outbound, communication of changes, it might be funding, it might be resource availability, that information is always needed from stakeholders. Now, think about outbound plans. And when I say stakeholders, I don't mean just the key stakeholders or the customers, I do mean all people who have a stake in the success or unfortunately failure of the project. So now let's shift to outbound plans, what information is needed to push, so you can think again, from the project team to the various stakeholders. You want to think of things like alerts, when risks might be coming up, when we're about to hit milestones, when we have hit milestones, how much better that is. And then, again, always communicating changes. You know, plans start as one, projects start as one set of plans, but without fail, they always change as you progress. You want to understand how can you go about creating those inbound and outbound plans. Here's a good workflow to think through. Start with the who, always start with the who, and think about it as the receiver of either the inbound or outbound communications. Who are they? And then maybe consider their role. And then a pivot to what are their needs? What is what's the content of the communication? We'll do some examples in the next slide. Then you pivot to the when. Think about the communication frequency, that does matter. You can overwhelm them, you can underwhelm them. So you want to be on target with the frequency that will satisfy the stakeholder. Lastly, you want to think about how, what channels are appropriate. There's so many ways to communicate. And we'll look at some examples on the next screen. But this is a good planning process to take you to develop, to take you through in order to develop your inbound and outbound plans. All right, here's some examples of different stakeholders, and how we tailor our inbound and outbound plans to meet their needs. Let's consider the sponsor. Through requirements, through just asking the sponsor, what kind of communications are you looking for, the frequency, and what channels work best for you, we could find that they would want maybe weekly progress, and in a virtual meeting. Notice that maybe they don't want daily, they just, weekly is good enough, and make sure to meet me virtually. Here's a good stakeholder to think about your resistant stakeholders, the ones who would say that the success of this project would be a detriment to them. Well, maybe you want to consider communicating benefits. Look how things are improving in the environment. And maybe consider communicating as appropriate. And you know, you don't want to just send out a generic email blast, consider the personal touch on how you can reach out to this resistant stakeholder. What about a risk owner? How should you communicate with them? Well, one, you definitely want to communicate the possible possibility, hey, alert, this risk looks like it will actualize into an issue. So give them alert gives them warnings, consider, you know, communicating them trigger metric, hey, we hit the defined metric, it's time to go into action. And then, you know, again, the the channel, when if it's if it's has occurred, then you don't want to delay, you don't want to send a email, for example, best to get in front of them, if in person, even better, but a phone call as well. So you are speaking in real time. Consider the project team as a stakeholder, often they get overlooked as stakeholders. And what kind of communications might they want? Definitely think about encouragement. That's something that might be not considered as a value build to the project. But remember, it's people that do the projects. So the more you can lift their morale lift their spirit on the project, and especially highlight their achievements, face to face in person is always nice, that that's a way to again, communicate effectively. Notice how all these cross into the other project domains, right? progress, you know, schedule, stakeholders, of course, stakeholder management, risk management, and then team member management, again, so you can see how furthering the point that communication is vital, important to project success. All right, let's talk about some supporting tools, and especially technology and how that can assist you in communication management. All right, let's start, let's start at the low end, something that's very, maybe reachable, just spin up a Word document. And you can see an example on screen of some of the the how you can structure your communication plan. You know, this is simple, effective, because you do have a plan, that's the effectiveness of it, you've considered thought through, you know, source these, these requirements, and you're going to have a plan going forward. What's good about this also is that especially if you use a cloud tool, now, now the entire project team can be aware of it. And if need be share the responsibility. More importantly, you have one source of truth. From the outset, you can say, here's what we planned to do with communications management. How are we doing? So again, just having that one source of truth is a big lift and a note of reassuring the team that you're on project, you're, you're on task when it comes to the project. Another tool to consider lists, whether it's in Excel, or going ahead and using Microsoft lists, there's a lot of lift to using lists. For example, you can control the data types in in Excel or Word, you can use any field or any column can receive any type of input, whether it's text, numbers, alphanumeric, or, or even images, right. But within lists, you can control what type of input should be into each field. You can even create choice fields, that way, you know, the input data is, is, is accurate, and usable. Another lift with lists is role level security, you can say only certain individuals are have access to certain rows, or not at all. So you can have view only, or read write access. Lastly, because lists crosses into the dataverse within Microsoft, you have the ability to do simple automations, right, right within their simple things like when when updates happen, please email it with a certain change happens, again, please send a notification. So there's good reason to use lists. Another lift to your project communication management tool could be using a power app. You can see on screen that you can start with just using Microsoft Copilot to build your app, and it will build the tables for you. So one another way that it's beneficial is that it will automate your tasks, you can simplify your work. And then again, we're in the dataverse. So you can use your connectors through power automate to build in some flows. So that way your work communication flows are, are managed by by the tool and not by, unfortunately, sticky notes or even just having to anxiously remember. Also, you can have a communications power BI and saying, hey, here's the communications we committed to, how are we doing? So again, there's a lift when you cross over into the dataverse and power automate. Alright, to bring it together, we've talked about effective communication strategies and how we saw that they do improve project success. So consider your communication strategies on your next project, or even your current project right now. We highlighted inbound and outbound communications and how to go about that. It's just another way to think about your communications. It's usually easy to think about what do I need to communicate to or who do I need to communicate to? But consider what does the project team need to be inbound? What do you need to keep your project going? And go ahead and list those out. You can use a supporting tool, we've mentioned things like documents, lift it to a spreadsheet or lift it up to an app. That way it does the work for you and relieves some of the mental process on the project team. AdvisaCon does do training services when it comes to project management. If you found this helpful and would like to know more about our printing services, you can go to our website and look at the Practical Project Management course. Thank you for watching this webinar. Please feel free to reach out with any questions, like or follow us on our social media platforms, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We offer many free trainings in our online academy. You can access those by visiting advisacon.thinkific.com. For project managers, simply become a member of AdvisaCon Academy to receive the code to redeem PDUs. Thank you again for watching and we'll see you next time. Transcribed by https://otter.ai