10.3 Monitor Communications

Check whether the information you are sending is landing and being useful.

Monitoring and Controlling / Communications · ← PMBOK reference · See it on the map

Why it matters

Sending updates nobody reads or understands is no better than sending nothing; this is what catches that before it becomes a stakeholder complaint.

What done looks like

Stakeholder feedback on communications has been gathered and the plan adjusted if needed.

First time tip

Ask a stakeholder directly whether an update was useful, rather than assuming silence means it landed fine. Silence usually just means nobody read it.

What you need (Inputs)

• Project Management Plan
• Issue Log
  How Scrum/Kanban projects satisfy this — counted from: impediments (driftless/models/agile.py:Impediment) — an impediment IS an issue raised against the team's progress; healthy once none are open or in progress
• Lessons Learned Register
  How Scrum/Kanban projects satisfy this — counted from: sprint retrospective evidence (driftless/models/delivery.py:Sprint) — a sprint closed with retrospective notes is a lesson captured, the way a predictive project files one as prose
• Project Communications
• Work Performance Data
• Enterprise Environmental Factors
• Organizational Process Assets

How you do it (Tools & Techniques)

• Expert Judgment
• Project Management Information System
• Data Analysis
• Data Representation
• Interpersonal and Team Skills
• Meetings

What you get (Outputs)

• Work Performance Information
  How Scrum/Kanban projects satisfy this — counted from: sprints under way (driftless/models/delivery.py:Sprint) for an agile project, or service levels and incidents (driftless/models/operations.py) for an operations-cadence one — a sprint under way is the work performance data an agile team reads instead of a baseline-and-actuals pair; an operations-cadence project reads the same question off its service levels and the incidents raised against them
• Change Requests

Worked example

Three weeks in, the project manager phones four residents and asks whether the postcard arrived in time and whether it made sense. Two say the shutoff hours were confusing and one never got a text at all, so the bulletin is reworded to give exact hours and the wrong phone number is corrected in the contact list.

Common pitfalls

• Reading no complaints as proof the updates are landing, when it usually means nobody read them.
• Asking only the stakeholders who are easy to reach, and hearing back only from the ones already content.
• Collecting feedback and then changing nothing, so the same confusion comes back next month.

How driftless helps

• Meetings can be run here.