90% of the Project Manager’s time is spent in communication.
That axiom was a standard on the Project Management Professional’s exam for decades. For many of us, that conjures up a vision of a PowerPoint presentation with embedded Microsoft Project® Gantt charts or some fragnet out of a network diagram view (begin snoring here…).
The tragedy is that we see ourselves first as Project Managers, but with Communicator as a distant secondary role. The two roles, however, are hand in glove. You cannot be an effective communicator without being a good project manager, and vice versa. When we communicate, we need to manage our messaging in much the same way that we manage our projects. We need to know what the objectives are, how we’re going to reach them, and when we’re going to reach them.
Effective communication is borne out of a few critical notions:
- How much time do we have with our receiver(s)?
- What do we want them to walk away with?
- How can we get that message across to them without boring them to tears?
- How do we leverage the information in the tools without information overload?
In the upcoming webinar, we’ll examine those questions from a journalist’s perspective. With roughly ten years as a member of the media (sorry), Carl Pritchard, PMP®, PMI-RMP® engages you with an hour of insight on how you can answer those critical questions. He points all the way back to the 1400’s (before MSP), and stresses that the lessons learned by Gutenberg are applicable even today.
By learning to weave your mastery of MS Project together with your opportunities as a communicator, you can:
- Highlight the message that drives home your communication objective
- Understand why squeezing a whole Gantt chart onto a single slide is a bad idea
- Learn the power of the inverted pyramid for those with short attention spans
- Be prepared for the basic questions of Who, What, When, Where, How…and most importantly, Why.
In my upcoming webinar we’ll cover:
- Giving them a reason to be engaged
- Holding them long enough to get your point across
- Securing their commitments to getting work done
Gather more event details and register here.
About Carl Pritchard, PMP®, PMI-RMP®:
I earned my Journalism degree from The Ohio State University, and worked as a broadcast journalist in Maine, New Hampshire, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. In that role, I learned the tricks to abbreviate messages without losing the point. Since then, I’ve used those skills to build relationships as a project manager for 30 years.
No one makes the argument that they never communicate. They argue that they don’t communicate well, or that others simply don’t seem to get the message. The “others” are getting a message, but the challenge is that it’s often not the message we intended to send.
I look forward to working with you in this engaging hour together.
