Communication Management

Why is communication management a big deal?

Now that you know who your stakeholders are, you need to know how to communicate effectively with those various groups of stakeholders.

Your goal here is to drive clarity and alignment across all stakeholders.

Effective communication is a critical skill for technical program managers because you are responsible for coordinating the work of multiple teams and stakeholders. In this lesson, we will cover the key principles of effective communication. By the end of this lesson, you should better understand how to effectively manage communication as a technical program manager.

You can create and influence the ongoing communication culture of the program by setting up key communication opportunities and avenues.

Sync vs. async

As discussed earlier in the course, you can think about managing momentum by thinking about two general categories:

• Synchronous activities (sync): These are things that can't happen in parallel with other things and usually require many people to be involved. These activities cost more in terms of time, such as a team meeting.

• Asynchronous activities (async): These are things that can happen in parallel with other things. These activities cost less in terms of time, such as a biweekly status report.

Utilizing activities in both these areas will help you maintain program momentum.

The traditional work model relies heavily on synchronous activities to get things done. But relying too heavily on synchronous activities is a program momentum killer. Meetings create a ton of waste. If you're a practitioner of lean management, then you know how important it is to eliminate waste!

Are all meetings useless? Absolutely not.

Having only asynchronous activities will kill program trust and healthy working relationships. It turns the program into a transaction experience for anonymous people who happen to work at the same company.

The best model is to appropriately mix both sync and async activities into your program's execution phase.

The baseline you should aim for is this:

• A weekly (or biweekly) meeting with the core program team (the 1st-degree stakeholders).

• A biweekly (or monthly) report that goes out to all stakeholders.

• An async chatting mechanism for all core program team members to speak ad-hoc, such as a dedicated program Slack channel.

This baseline will set a healthy cadence for the core program team to check in and be accountable for various pieces of work.

Now, let's learn how to run these baseline communications.

Sync methods

One-time meetings

There are a few one-time meetings that may occur throughout the lifecycle of the program.

• Program kick-off: see the "Initiation Wrap-up" lesson.

• Planning to execution transition: see the "Planning Wrap-up" lesson.

• Onboarding new stakeholders: see the "Stakeholder Management" lesson.

• Specific topic discussions

  • Be on the lookout for topics that are too complex to handle via email or messaging. Lots of back-and-forth comments indicate that we need to meet for 30 minutes to realign the conversation.

  • Additionally, pay attention to times when dedicated meetings get too detailed and off-topic. Invite the team members to hold these discussions in a different forum with appropriate focus time on that topic.

Program team meetings

Program team meetings are the most common way to establish consistent program momentum. These should be recurring meetings.

Set the expectation that these program team meetings are essential and required. This is a prime example of a synchronous method to drive program cadence.