3.2 Communication and Collaboration Management

Summary: Highlights the importance of effective communication and collaboration within project teams and with stakeholders, emphasizing strategies for fostering productive interactions and resolving conflicts to achieve project objectives.

Learning Objectives:

1. Develop skills in managing communication and collaboration within project teams and with stakeholders to facilitate smooth project execution.
2. Learn techniques for fostering effective communication channels and resolving conflicts to maintain productive collaboration.

Communication among partners and different stakeholders are important. A well functioning communication leads to successful collaboration (Martin etal., 2016). Miscommunication and/or misunderstandings would hinder the Project progress and its potential. Due to miscommunication, Project activities can be implemented differently or incorrectly by each partner. This would lead quality and quantity drop in activities which will cause that the Project objectives are not met.

In order to ensure a good communication among partners and stakeholders, different medias, channels and frequency of use of these channels should be identified in the planning phase and incorporated into the proposal. Since quality and use of the digital channels are improved in recent years, most of the communication can be done virtually. One of the most important aspect that you need to do is documentation of each communication. Decisions and topics discussed should be documented and circulated to related persons, so everyone can be on the same page.

In the proposal, you can either categorize the meetings/communication by media or its objectives. If you want to make a categorization by media, you can split the communication in two main groups: virtual/online and physical/face-to-face. Then you can create sub-categories (such as written, verbal, video-conference for virtual/online communication).

It is possible to categorize the meetings/communication by objectives. Examples for this categorization are top management meetings, workpackage meetings, quality meetings, risk handling/management meetings, procurement meetings.

In either way, under each categorization you need to specify objectives, media/channels, frequency of use, participants, locations.