Control your lines of communication

When running a project, a clear communication strategy amongst your team is essential.

It’s the infrastructure of a good process.

Keeping everyone up-to-date is challenging, though. It’s relatively simple to run a small project with three people involved, but if the client suddenly decides to involve five more people in the decision process, the communication effort grows tenfold!

Messages get lost and you get overwhelmed with feedback from all directions. And there’s always that guy that doesn’t ‘reply all’ or CC you in e-mails and sends crucial information via SMS or WhatsApp.

I’ve even experienced a project member taking a photo of an e-mail with their phone, attaching it to a WhatsApp message with their reply below. That makes traceability almost impossible.

Adding only a few people to a project increases the lines of communication exponentially

Just like big transport agencies need to plan large road network expansions thoroughly beforehand, so should you when starting a project of any size.

Make sure to ask these questions as early as possible:

1. How many decision makers are there, client-side? More importantly, are all of them necessary?
2. How many people from your team should be involved along the whole journey?
3. Which channels does everyone prefer for communicating? (email, phone, SMS, Slack, Teams, Tinder?) Keep the list as small as possible. Ideally pick only one.

(Over)communication fatigue

As the diagram below shows, projects that involve more than five members require a large communication effort. It’s time-consuming and frustrating—at times—to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

There are tools and platforms that can help gather feedback and minimise the number of communication channels. I’ve recently found Monday.com (visual tracking workspace) and Frame.io extremely helpful. Even though Frame.io is built for videos, we’ve used it to combine client feedback for a report we were producing. We uploaded a PDF draft and five stakeholders commented and discussed feedback straight onto the same page in a tidy and combined way.

Be aware and mindful of the burden of overcommunication. Keep your teams as lean as possible, stick to the agreed communication channels and test tools that will give you a hand along the way.