How to prevent team project from failure

by Leattytia Badibanga ⎸Blog ⎸04.04.2016

Project communication plan

The backbone of any project is without a doubt the communication plan. Developing an effective project communication plan certainly acts in favor of any team’s success. Strong strategies facilitate effective and efficient communications with the various audiences having a major stake in the project. A plan describes how project communications will occur. Assuring a clear two-way communication among all members is the key that forestalls surprises, prevents duplication of effort, and can help to reveal omissions and misallocation of resources early enough to permit corrections.

Fail to plan is a plan to fail!

The following shows how to plan communication strategies that help steer a team project from failure.

Communication objective

First, what are you hoping to achieve with your project communications? The objective teams should be seeking first is transparency and accountability. Transparency is characterized by the feeling of trust at all levels. Management trusts employees with great amounts of responsibility. Employees not only trust one another but also trust that management has their best interests in mind.

Eliminate ambiguity by removing any potential for confusion, and this includes project guidelines, roles, responsibilities, and processes. Accountability begins with a clear understanding of who is responsible for which parts of the project. Employees struggle when management leaves important information open for interpretation. To avoid potential problems, follow up often and be clear about the expectations for open communication at all positions during the project timeline.

Members must know what’s going on throughout assignments to be able to react to any issues in short delays and be in the best place to excel at their own part of the project. You definitely want more than weekly follow ups. We believe that frequent daily updates will give better results. No need to plan hours-long meetings every day, but information should flow in all directions with group chat support, internal messaging support, or one-on-one meetings throughout the week.

Format and delivery method for the communication

Firstly establish how your target audience prefers to receive information. What works best: report, phone call, meeting, formal presentation, video conference? Good communication grows complex as the scope of the project increases, more people are involved, and teams even get dispersed around the globe.

For instance, if you are facing issues that are delaying your project, you can’t afford to wait until the person you contacted decides to act. The most effective way to obtain a response to a request is to tell people upfront what you want them to do and when you want it done with a visual face-to-face, or why not in a video! When you choose your communication options, opt for the ones that get information to your members in the most time-efficient manner. That leads me to the fact that videos are the most effective way to communicate. If a picture is worth 1000 words then videos are literally priceless. To give it a precise number value, a video is actually worth 1.8 million words per minutes. It’s easy to use video solutions and make your communication faster, more fluid, engaging and efficient. According to scientists, our brain is more apt at comprehending audiovisual content than text. Progress and project status reports are generated regularly at varying levels of detail and at various stages through a project’s monitoring and reporting cycle. Project reports and follow ups should take a minimum of effort to generate and should, more importantly, be very easy to consume by the audience.

Since videos are the best format to convey messages in team projects, let’s analyze which delivery channel would be the best.

A chat group can be great; it allows scattered teams to have short, less formal discussions, when decisions don’t necessarily need to be documented. But a nice feature is that conversations are archived so that teammates who weren’t involved in real time can catch up on earlier discussions. Also, chat tools are practical for one-on-one conversations that don’t need to be shared with the entire team. But let’s face it, so much of our communication is written and much of it takes place in scattered time intervals through tools like email. It’s important from time to time that it occur in real time where all parties actually see each other, right? Unlike 20 years ago, there is a wealth of new technology-based tools available to facilitate efficient communication, mostly mobile now! Working on-the-go is way easier with mobiles, and most people possess a smartphone now and use their device at work. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is a great complement to a group chat app and lets you bring the whole office with you wherever you go. What if we could have a mobile team app that would allow us to communicate in real time and actually be as beneficial as face-to-face conversations? That’s what has been built: Kast, a video-based corporate app to improve internal communication and assure the success of team projects.

Control and tracking

Project controls are the data gathering, management and analytical processes used to predict, understand and constructively influence the time and cost outcomes of a project through the communication of information in formats that assist effective management and decision making. The execution of a project is based on a robust project plan and can only be achieved through an effective schedule control methodology. Furthermore, it is widely recognized that planning and monitoring plays a major role as the cause of project failures as well. Quality control starts when a project is initiated and lasts throughout the entire life cycle until it’s developed. It aims to ensure that activities and tasks at any given stage can be signed off so that the project can continue developing. Tracking refers to monitoring, measuring and controlling progress on the project. The purpose is to ensure that project work is being done as scheduled. The project management needs to track work progress at any given step to make sure the project goes in the right direction.

In a team project, the biggest challenge isn’t resources or schedule bu, more likely, the communication flow and member’s collaboration through it. Whatever your team size, consider what it needs to work best and use its size to your advantage.

You CAN prevent your team project’s failure; plan its success with the optimum corporate tool developed.