Subtitles of the Movie

An introduction of the Project Communications Management Knowledge Area will be our focus for this movie. Communications is something that is often drilled down to reports and holding meetings, but those are just some of the tools involved within Communications which is critical to a project's success. The purpose of the knowledge area is to ensure that timely and appropriate generation, collection, storage, retrieval and distribution of project information. It's concerned with connecting people and information to result in successful communications within the project and also making sure that the project team or anyone involved within the project understands how communications affects the project. Once you've gone through the knowledge area's processes in greater detail this will make more sense, another point that is important and that may even surface on the certification exam is that 90 percent of a Project Manager's time is spent communicating. If you previously didn't grasp the level of importance that this knowledge area has, this should put it in a different context for you. Something that you'll learn and have reinforced within this knowledge area is that communication is not just verbal or written there are various types of communications such as verbal and non-verbal, formal and informal, sender Ð receiver models, encoding and decoding messages, all of which we'll go through in detail in this course. There are four processes to this knowledge area let's go over them briefly. The first process is Communications Planning where the communication and information needs of the Project Stakeholders are determined. The next process is Information Distribution which makes the needed information available to the Project Stakeholders in a timely manner. The third process is Performance Reporting; this process focuses on collecting and distributing performance information including things like status reporting, progress measurement and forecasting. And the final process of this knowledge area is Manage Stakeholders; here the focus is on managing communications to satisfy the requirements of and resolve issues with Project Stakeholders. Notice the concentration and focus of these processes around the Project Stakeholders, in the Scope Knowledge Area one of the things that we covered is the importance of making sure that the Project Scope is complete meaning that all requirements and expectations of the Project Stakeholders have been covered. It's here in the Communications Knowledge Area that this occurs. The communications with stakeholders is planned and takes place making sure that all of their needs and expectations are uncovered and addressed. As I like to do with all knowledge areas we'll take a moment to go through the process group that each of these four processes belongs to. Communications Planning unsurprisingly is part of the Planning Process Group; this is the only communications related process that takes place in this process group. Information Distribution is part of the Executing Process Group and both Performance Reporting and Manage Stakeholders are a part of the Monitoring and Controlling Process Group and with that we can close out this introduction and overview of the Project Communications Management Knowledge Area. In the next movie we'll go through the knowledge area's process flow.