Be prepared for anything. If communication is 90% of a project’s success, then what should you communicate about?

Here is my takeaway #21 from one of the most useful practical books in my field, “Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager”:

21) “Communication is 90% of a project’s success. By documenting the top risks and the plan to offset them, everyone on your team can row in the same direction.”

Note: This comes from Chapter 4 “Planning the Project: Milestone or Mirage?” (pages 87)

I like to add the word “great” in front of communication, because there are a lot of things to consider in order for great communication to “win the day”. There is a lot that can go wrong with communication. It seems crazy to me when we say a relationship broke down over not enough communication, when in reality it takes great communication from both sides to accomplish anything together and both sides have to be “on the same page” as to what great communication even is.

————————–

STORY TIME:

“Stroke. Stroke. Stroke.” The first fictional short story I ever wrote, was about this concept. It was based on real life, as sometimes our true-to-life stories are better than fiction. I’ll give the shortened version as I am relating it to this topic.

My friends and I were on a Boy Scout trip canoeing down a river in the backwoods of Indiana. I was always a small kid, but one of the bigger kids refused to go in the canoe with anyone else, despite our horrible weight distribution. I was riding high above the water in the front of the canoe the whole way, and he was dragging anchor through many of the shallower sandbar areas.

We were the slowest canoe coming around every bend in the river. We often had to get out and carry our canoe, but not just because of our obvious disadvantages. We were poor at communicating when we were switching sides that we were each paddling on, and I usually could not offset us from tipping over by throwing myself one side or the other to counterbalance him if he leaned too far to one side. We spent a lot of time in the water. On top of that, the communications about where the next pull off would be didn’t always reach our ears.

At one point, we passed everyone up while they had pulled off on a shoreline. I think they were figuring out and pointing out on the map where the pull off spot was for the night just ahead. That came at the next possible place, one of many forks in the river that eventually merged again downstream, and we somehow never saw a sign on the riverbanks pointing which way to go for the pull-off.

My leaders thought they were going to be reporting missing kids the next day to the police, but we guessed what had happened and solved the problem. We could have waited until the next day sleeping under our canoe (because it was raining) for the others to come downstream, but we found a trail that cut across the woods to where they were located. (This was before cell phones. That form of communication would have needed to be transported in a well-sealed bag if it was on our persons…haha. And we would not likely have had cell phone coverage out there anyway.)

————————-

I would not say this journey was a complete success, unless not dying was the objective, but not a failure either. I guess it depends on how you define success. Better communication and risk management could have afforded us much better outcomes. That was one tiring and frustrating trip. But we learned a lot. Maybe it prepared me to carry out my very first real project, which was a resounding success–my Eagle Scout Project. Maybe not.

You don’t have to learn everything from your projects the hard way. Communicate everything. Be organized, in step with everyone as the actions materialize, and catch whatever information seems awry before it becomes too much of a problem. Record what is going right and what is going wrong as you go and do it better next time or better yet, learn from other’s mistakes and stories and save yourself the trouble of going through it yourself!