Read and reflect on the assigned readings/videos for the week. Respond to both the below:
- Based on the different concepts covered, choose one topic area to explore further. Conduct online research related to that topic across at least two articles. Post a summary (2-3 paragraphs) of these learnings to further educate your peers on the subject.
- Provide a graduate-level response to one of the following questions:
- If the project team identifies certain stakeholders as being resistant to a change that the project is going to yield, how might the team work to overcome that resistance?
- What are some methods to ensure stakeholders stay engaged with the project? How can you query that such engagement is present?
- What is the purpose and what is included within the project status report? What frequency might a PM generate the report based on different project sizes/lengths?
Your post must be substantive and demonstrate insight gained from the course material. Postings must be in the student's own words - do not provide quotes nor use ChatGPT or other tools to write on your behalf!
Your initial post should be at least 450+ words and in APA format (including Times New Roman with font size 12 and double spaced). Post the actual body of your paper in the discussion thread then attach a Word version of the paper for APA/Plagiarism review. Module Overview:
It is often said that a Project Manager’s job is 90% communication. With this in mind, there is great importance in making sure communications to our stakeholders are meeting their expectations and are interpreted correctly. We communicate in a variety of ways, set forth based on our communication plans from project planning. During project control, our goal is to make sure those communications are occurring as expected, the messages meet expectations, and the information is properly interpreted. In addition, our project will have a variety of resources working on it. During project control, we make sure these resources are being used to their maximum potential and that they are being onboarded and released to the project as applicable according to the schedule.
Module Objectives:
By the end of this module, you will be able to:
- Students will learn the importance of change management and the impact of change to stakeholders
- Using the ADKAR model, students will be able to learn how stakeholders may offer resistance to change
- Throughout a project, students will demonstrate how to create project status reports and offer proper communications to stakeholders.
Learning Materials:
Project Status Reports
One of the main components of the project control process is the activity of the Project Manager to provide consistent updates to the status of the project. The Project Manager should review the stakeholder analysis to understand which stakeholders need what type of communication and tailor updates accordingly for each stakeholder group. Communication and visibility to the project is a common theme per numerous researchers as to why projects could fail. A project status report will include numerous sections, and likely customized per organization, but often will include:
- Project Status Color (red/yellow/green - reflective of the overall concern level to the success of the project).
- Project Update (narrative of what has occurred since the last update)
- Upcoming tasks/milestones
- Past due tasks
- High Level Risks
- Change Requests
- Open Issues / Actions
Take some time to search online and review examples of different project status reports.
Monitor Communications
The best way to monitor communication is to solicit feedback from the recipient of the communication to understand if the amount of information is meeting their expectations and if they are properly interpreting the information. As the Project Manager generates different reports and publishes them out for stakeholders to review, we may make incorrect assumptions that the stakeholders will understand what those reports mean. Thus, the Project Manager should confirm that such is not occurring via surveying the team, holding meetings with stakeholders, etc. to ensure proper clarity and alignment on communications.
Take a moment to review this video relating to monitoring communications.
Monitoring Stakeholders
Stakeholders are defined as all individuals or groups who have a role in the project and can potentially impact, either positively or negatively, its deployment. Stakeholders can be either internal or external. Internal stakeholders are those within your organization, whereas external stakeholders are those outside your organization. It is also important to consider stakeholders who may not be actively working on your project. For example, an environmental group may not directly work on your project but could impose restrictions which could impact the project success. A project team will perform a stakeholder analysis to classify stakeholders appropriately. Further, this will let you know when and how to best communicate the project status, issues, etc to the appropriate stakeholder groups. During project control, we should make sure there are no changes to the stakeholder groups, along with their interest, power, etc. to the project. The stakeholder analysis should be revisited periodically when dealing with a multi-year project.
Watch a brief video about stakeholder analysis.
Monitoring Resources
Resources may come and go throughout the timeline of the project according to the resource plan established during project planning. During project control, the Project Manager will monitor that the resources are ramping onto and off the project as necessary to complete the applicable activities and deliverables that they are assigned to. Any variances to this plan will need to be addressed via modifications to the plan. Furthermore, if there becomes any delays in the project, it is up the Project Manager/team to communicate these changes to resources and update their applicable schedules so their utilization stays aligned to when they are needed. This is especially true if your resources are third party contractors; we need to ensure their costs are controlled, thus they should only be used when utilized based on their contract/statement of works and updated as changes occur. If resources are pulled or leave the project, the Project Manager will work with the team to determine a new course forward replacing those resources and making adjustments to the plans as applicable (including going through change control if needed because of significant resource changes).
Change Management
Most projects have impacts that will require a degree of change management; which is often defined as two separate things: 1) how people are impacted by a change and 2) the change request/administration process. Change management involves the impact of changes on different stakeholders and how they will react to these changes (positive or negative). Integrated change control references the formalized process for changing the scope, cost, or schedule baselines in the project.
For the people side of change, project team members need to navigate how changes impact the day-to-day lives of stakeholders and may even find resistance to changes; thus, causing additional efforts of the team to actively work to identify these resistors and determine how to overcome such.
Watch the following videos related to Change Management:
References
Project Management Institute. (2021). A guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK guide) (7th ed.). Project Management Institute
Additional Resources
Please read the following articles: