1) How important are communication skills in project management? The project managers hold a very high importance as they spend alot of time communicating with individuals and groups. In fact, it’s beenestimated that project managers spend 90% of their time on communicationrelated activities this makes sense when you consider that communicationoverlaps with most aspects of a project managers job from assigning tasks to teammembers to providing status updates a project manager is constantlycommunicating.
A project manager with good communication skills ends upamplifying the effectiveness of everyone he interacts with. This greatlyincreases the likelihood of his project meeting or exceeding stakeholderexpectations. In conclusion, I must say that understanding the importance ofcommunication skills in project management is the first step to successfully managingyour projects. 2.
Was Herb the right person to be assigned as the projectmanager? Herb’sselection as a project manager for his new assignment was right or wrong needsto evaluate before drawing any conclusion. There are number of factors thatneed to be considered before picking up the right person. In this project, halfof the requirement was R&D and other half was manufacturing. Based on therequirements of the project Herb was the perfectly match professional as he hadprior experience both in R& D and manufacturing and also, had a PhD. But hehad limited interactions with the stakeholders and project staffs in hisprevious project. In this case study, it was not clear enough that Alice, Bob,Betty and Frank had any prior project management experience. Other teammember’s expertise in management had also not been discussed. Therefore, as areader of this case study, we would say, although Herb had a limited knowledgein project management but the decision of the company to pick him as a PM wasthe right decision.
But if we would have a clear picture of project managementexperience of all the fourteen people, we could have drawn our conclusion indifferent way. 3.There were communications issues with Alice, Bob, Betty, andFrank. For each communication issue, where was the breakdown in communications:encoding, decoding, feedback, and so on?Alice: In thediscussion with Alice the breakdown in the correspondence began when Aliceencoded the message.
She didn’t approach Herb for the suggestion letter in thisway he didn’t compose it. Sway: in thediscussion Bob expresses the designing experts overlooked the discussion Herbhad with them and the tests were not running as Herb coordinated. The correspondencebreakdown for this situation is in the decoder/recipient side. Betty/Frank: thecorrespondence breakdown for this situation began when Betty did not unravelthe message appropriately and did not the same as she was advised to. It was presumablyand issue with the message encoding which was not sufficiently particular. Herbcould have disclosed to Betty that the last acquisition choice was not her dutyfrom the earliest starting point (on the off chance that he didn’t do).
