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Deciding on Information Distribution Project Management

Once you know who you need to communicate to and something about their needs, you need to decide on what you will distribute and how you will distribute the information. You might take an inventory of what forms of information you can create and the methods your organization has (or which you can obtain) for distributing information.

First, what kinds of information will you distribute? The list could be almost endless and could include some of the following information: status/progress; escalations; issues; risks and risk response plans; quality standards; project processes and standards; contracts; change requests; scope statements; team directory; work breakdown structure; schedule or budget and their variances; requirements; specifications; user guides; test plans; reports; project charter; responsibility and organization charts; and a project plan.

Second, you will then decide on how the information will be distributed, such as e-mails, written memos, formal or informal meetings, presentations (including charts and graphs), conference or video calls, websites, instant messaging, videos, TV, press releases, faxes, voicemail, articles, brochures, announcements, phone calls, and speeches.

Not only do you need to think about how you push information to your team or other stakeholders, you also need to consider the way your team or stakeholders will pull information when they need to get to it. Do you store all your information on a website or in an electronic database? Or do you store it in a project management software files, or in an electronic directory, or in hard copy via a file cabinet or notebook? Some of these decisions might be based on the need for archiving files or corporate policies.

The decisions about what and how information is distributed may be based on how often and how formal the information needs are, your organization’s capabilities, or your people’s skills, and confidentiality and need to know. Do people need information updated frequently, or can people wait for a week? If your team is not trained in reading and using a project schedule, you may need to find a simpler form for communicating status and progress rather than using a Gantt chart. Or you may need to find project management training for the team.

What’s more, you need to match the right kind of information, with the right kind of audience, at the right time. For instance, although you may create a status report, you may find you need to design two kinds of status reports: a detailed status report for the team involving the status of each of the team’s deliverables for the week and an overview of major deliverables, budget, and escalations for executives. The format for each may also be entirely different so that the team sees the detailed schedule and executives see only a high-level milestone report.

Last but not least, you need to decide how you can get information to people when they request it outside of the regularly scheduled times or stakeholders have special requests for information you don’t normally provide. In other words, you need to create an information distribution strategy. Following are some guidelines on how to create an information distribution strategy:
  • Decide on your major forms of communication for the various types of information you will be creating. For instance you might have a written status via presentations for executives; and meetings, issues, and updated schedules for your team meetings.
  • Decide on the technology or method you will use to distribute the information: e-mail, Internet, written memos, or a directory structure on the network.
  • Decide how often you will distribute your different forms of information. You might start forming a matrix for this kind of information that will eventually be complete in a communications plan (discussed in the next exercise).
  • Let the team members know where all the information is, where they can put their information, and how they can get information when it’s needed.