Subtitles of the Movie

Within each knowledge area you'll find an assessment in your Work Files that tests your knowledge of that knowledge area on a high level. The assessment is formatted at the fill in the blank method, tell you how much information you currently know and then later when you take it again after going through the individual process movies how much information you've retained. I recommend going through the assessment before the knowledge area overview after the overview and also after going through the individual process reviews pertaining to that knowledge area. This will tell you how much you already know and how much you've retained after going through the movies. In this movie, specifically we will cover the Communications Management Knowledge Area Assessment. The Knowledge Area Assessment tests your knowledge on the overall knowledge area's purpose, the individual process names, the process group that the processes belong to, the purpose of each individual process along with their key outputs. Let's begin by reviewing the knowledge area's purpose which is to ensure that timely and appropriate generation, collection, storage, retrieval and distribution of project information. I briefly mentioned earlier in this section that there are various types of communication which will also go through within this assessment. Next let's go through the communications related processes, in total there are four and this includes Communications Planning, Information Distribution, Performance reporting and Manage Stakeholders. In addition to recognizing the processes you also needed to know the process group that each belongs to. Communications Planning is part of the planning process group, Information Distribution is part of the executing process group, Performance Reporting is part if the monitoring and controlling process group and the final process Manage Stakeholders is also part of the monitoring and controlling process group. For these four processes we'll next go through the purpose of each and follow it with the processes key outputs. In the purpose of Communications Planning is to determine the information and communication needs of the project stakeholders. The purpose of Information Distribution is to make the needed information available to project stakeholders in a timely manner. With Performance reporting the purpose is to collect and distribute performance information which includes things like status reports, progress measurements and forecasting and Manage Stakeholders has a purpose of satisfying the requirements of and resolving issues with project stakeholders by managing communications. Let's move to the key outputs of these processes. The purpose of this exercise is to recall the major outputs of the process which will help you put the rest of the picture together such as what information or inputs would you need to generate these outputs and what tools and techniques do you and the project team utilize to do so. Communications Planning has only one output which is Communications Management Plan. Information Distribution has requested changes and there's actually only one other output to this process which are updates to the organizational process assets that may emerge out of going through the process. Performance reporting has several, performance reports, forecasts, requested changes and recommended corrective actions and if you aim for including all of the outputs the only one remaining is updates to the organizational process assets. Just a tip that other then the first process of this knowledge area all the other processes have updates to the organizational process assets as an output. Manage Stakeholders includes resolve issues, approved change requests and corrective actions. And again this could also include updates to the organizational process assets and updates to the Project Management Plan. Project Communications Management also includes various types of communication. One of the things that you need to be familiar with is a standard communications model or sender-receiver model. The assessment simply asks that you draw out the standard model. Here's a layout of the model, now let's fill in the 8 missing components. The first is Encode which is where ideas and thoughts are translated into a language that is understood by the recipient of the message. Number two is the message that is being conveyed. The three hash lines are noise and noise is anything that interferes with the transmission and understanding of the message by the receiver. Once the receiver gets the message they decode it and from there the receiver responds by encoding their own message and then by sending a message and once again the message goes through potential noise and the sender now decodes the message that was sent by the receiver. In a nutshell that's the basic model of communication. Within the Communication Management Knowledge Area there are other things covered including the various types of communications, the media used, writing styles, presentation techniques and meeting management techniques. While these aren't covered within the assessment they are things that you should know for the exam and that we'll be covering in this course. And that wraps up the Communications Knowledge Area Assessment bringing this movie to a close after reviewing the individual process movies once again I encourage you to come back to the assessment and test yourself to see how much information you retained and where you need additional review.