PM Network - June 2009

TIP Being a modern road warrior inevitably means relying on technology—but project managers should be prepared for an occasional glitch. Joss Marsh of Sovereign Business Integration is quite familiar with the issue as he tries to keep up communication between teams in England and Qatar. “We have had some problems with Internet lines being severed,” he says. “For that reason we use our own backup and storage over here.”

The team also makes extensive use of e-mail, rather than relying on an instant communication tool that could suffer from dropouts and data loss.

I talk to one

person at headquarters about everything, and likewise any

management communication from headquarters to the customer comes through me first.

—Joss Marsh, Sovereign Business Integration plc, London, England

72PM NETWORK JUNE 2009 WWW.PMI.ORG

“An effective component of a project communication plan is continually bringing forward the business value delivered,” says Ms. Jahnke.

Being away from the office, she says, makes it easy for contributions from team members to go overlooked. It’s up to the project leader to initiate mechanisms to promote project visibility, recognition and support. Ms. Jahnke has sent e-mails directly to a team member’s functional manager to acknowledge that person’s project contributions, for example.

Making sure team members receive credit for a job well done not only motivates them to keep up the good work, it also reflects well on the project leader.

Even the most stellar communication plan can benefit from a little face time, though.

When Pip Peel was working with the Talweelah Asia Power Co. to bid on a water project in Abu Dhabi in 2005, the stakeholders came from the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and the Middle East.

It fell on Mr. Peel to galvanize all the different players, and sometimes that required pulling everyone involved into one room.

“When we were working on the project we chose four key milestone events and tried to get as many people together as possible at these times,” says Mr. Peel, founder and director of PIPC Inc., a London-based project management company.