A Failure to Communicate

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A Failure to Communicate
Sue Dyer (August 10, 2006)

Poor communication is far and away the most cited reason by project teams for their failures, so by understanding the origins of communication problems you can vastly improve your chances for success. Culled from 134 project teams, here are seven causes of communication breakdown, and ways to prevent or overcome them.

Projects come in all types and sizes. There are information technology projects, strategic planning projects, budgeting projects, forecasting projects — almost any type of business activity will have a project associated with it. For the past ten years I’ve asked project teams “from your experience, what it is that makes one project succeed?” More than 95 percent of team members said that good communication was the reason for their success. When I asked the teams “from your experience, what is it that makes a project fail?” more than 95 percent said that poor communication was the reason for their failures. Clearly communication appears to be the key to project success.

After asking these questions of 134 project teams, and then working with each team to improve their results, I began to realize that often what the team believes to be a communication issue is actually a symptom of the real problem — or root cause. When a team identifies their problem as one of poor communication, and then works to try and resolve the “poor communication” issue, I found that significant improvement could not be made.

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