Chapter 11

The team members in my project deal with a person amongst them who holds back information which is clearly needed by her direct reports as well as supervisors. When asked for , she provides/ emails data in slices. Other team members constantly run into unnecessary delays because of her holding back the required information in the first place and then spending time in extracting data from her piece by piece. This ongoing bad communication creates resentment, bad team environment, schedule and cost over runs.
The bottom line in this chapter is that effective communication is essential for the health and success of a project. The main idea of this chapter is summarized in that when people work together to accomplish a common-unique goal, they need to coordinate their activities, agree on responsibilities and maintain cost-schedule-quality equilibrium. It is very important to set up formal mechanism for good communication through meetings and reporting. I was drawn to the example of Lockheed Martin where the innovative and collaborative communication strategies of the collocated engineers streamlined the decision making process and enabled them to incorporate changes quickly.

The change management process involves initial approval of the change and the process of controlling change. Once stakeholders accept it, the change becomes controlled and any further changes would need to go through the change management process again. Good communication makes the process of managing change efficient.