Four Communication Practices for Program Managers to Master
As a program or project manager, you have likely come to realize that most of your working hours are consumed in communicating with others – your team members, managers, extended team, customers, suppliers, possibly regulatory and government officials, and so forth. If you are new to the PM realm, the breadth and scope of program manager communications can be daunting.
I’ve found that four distinct communication practices are crucial to program managers’ long-term professional success and career growth. Focus your attention on these four, and work to get better at them over time.
The Program Manager Communication Toolkit
Meeting minutes or summary
I put this first because when I was a beginning PM, I strongly resisted it. Why? Writing minutes felt like being back in fifth grade student council, and seemed trivial. However, I soon realized the value of publishing a short report of what transpired and the decisions made in weekly or more frequent meetings, especially in a multi-site project team. (Aren’t we all, in 2023?)
Here are some techniques to simplify the writing and publishing, that will make ‘meeting minutes’ a staple of your program manager communications tool kit.
Prepare a meeting agenda to keep the meeting on task. Five to ten items generally works well. More than ten agenda items probably warrants multiple meetings.
Write the minutes during the meeting in an email draft, using your laptop. Actually, I prefer to call it the “meeting summary.” Open the previous meeting’s summary as a template, update the subject line with today’s date, and check the attendee list to note new attendees and absences.
As you go through the agenda, capture new news for each agenda item including who provided the information, if pertinent. Delete last week’s news or your summary will become unwieldy after many meetings. Carefully document all decisions made, and have the team review and okay the wording. Same for all new project risks or problems raised, along with the follow-up expectations (who and when).
Before adjourning, display the summary with the attendees, for one more chance to correct a misunderstanding or add important information. Then simply “Reply to All” to send your email, and the meeting summary is published. As your team reaches higher levels of performance, delegate the summary writing task to others, helping them develop the skill and freeing you to conduct the meeting. Win-win.
Milestone review with PMO or customer
The milestone review is an interactive formal presentation. As the PM, you will need to ensure the meeting stays on topic, so prepare an agenda and make it the first slide in the deck. Most such reviews are conducted with questions from the conferees as they arise, so be prepared to address concerns carefully and succinctly, keeping within your allotted time. Allow yourself enough time to prepare; my rule of thumb is an hour of prep time per 10 minutes of meeting time allocated.
Your presentation slides should have a clean look, without distracting backgrounds, transitions, or animations. Slides should be bullet or outline form, not sentences and paragraphs. In your delivery you will expand on the outline to provide the full picture to your audience. Don’t read your slides to the attendees.
Data tables or graphs should be clear and legible. If tables have many columns and rows of small type, find a way to summarize the data for presentation, and provide the full dataset as a supplement.
Include clear, crisp statements of progress, problems with root causes and corrective actions if known, and identified risks and mitigations. The program status against planned milestones should be presented with no ambiguity. If the project is behind plan, state that fact plainly and clearly, along with the reasons for delay and the actions underway to bring it back on track.
As the PM, if you need help from the executive team, PMO, or customer, it is best to raise those requests ahead of the “official” milestone review meeting, with the person(s) who can make the right decisions. In the review, you can then say you have discussed problem XYZ with the appropriate VP or director, and have agreed to do this, this, and this to resolve it.
Know the time allocated to your review and stay within it, ensuring the important points are covered. Follow up with a brief written report of secondary and tertiary subjects if needed.
If you have the intestinal fortitude, and are willing to act on the responses, follow up a day after the meeting with the conferees and ask what you could improve regarding content and delivery for future reviews. Most PM’s don’t ask, and most executives will be candid and forthright in responding, and will think more highly of you for having sought the feedback.
Daily stand-up review
These are brief meetings, 15 to 20 minutes, held in an open area (not a conference room with table and chairs), to keep people focused on the immediate tasks. It can be daily or perhaps 3 times per week as warranted, with an impromptu meeting occasionally. If the project team is distributed in multiple locations and time zones, the format obviously needs to be altered. Call it a stand-up anyway, to convey that it will be brief and informal.
Although it’s informal and interactive, you still need to be prepared to conduct a cogent discussion. My preferred format is 3 blocks: Corporate or business news that the team members should know; the 3 or 4 things we’re working on today and tomorrow; and concerns the team members want to raise. Use a whiteboard to capture information, actions, and comments from participants. Shoot a photo of the board and post the photo in the project team shared folder.
In the best of these meetings, you will find you are listening far more than talking. Make sure that over the course of several stand-ups that everyone has an opportunity to contribute. Quiet people have good ideas, even though they don’t always feel confident to state them aloud; call on people by name to let them speak up and be heard.
If your meeting is planned for 20 minutes and finishes in 12 once in a while, thank the team for participating and give them back their remaining 8 minutes. No one will complain!
Project meeting self-critique
This practice is particularly useful for regularly scheduled meetings of a cross-functional core team who work together for many months (a.k.a., a project). In the last 3 minutes before adjourning, have each attendee verbally score the meeting from 1 to 5. A rating of ‘1’ is the worst meeting ever, a ‘5’ is best. Pretty subjective, perhaps. Tally the scores, and record them in the meeting summary.
Then, ask the attendees for brief comments on what went well, and what to do differently. This is the value of the process. The 3-minute drill is non-threatening, it’s done in a group who trust one another, and it’s done for the purpose of improving the program manager communication (2-way) and team performance over time.
Track the self-evaluations over time, and every 6 or 8 meetings show the team the trend over that period. It will be rare that a team does not improve. High-performing teams are self-aware, or maybe it’s the other way around. What tends to happen is that knowing they are going to rate their team performance at the end of the meeting makes people consciously focus their attention on not just the work itself but also on the process of carrying it out, and to be collaborative rather than combative.
Finally, a riddle.
What do you call four communication practices for improving your performance as a Program Manager?
A good start!
Dann Gustavson, PMP®, Lean Six-Sigma Black Belt, helps Program Managers and their teams achieve superior results through high-impact program execution. Prepare, structure, and run successful programs in product engineering, manufacturing operations (including outsourcing), and cross-functional change initiatives.
Contact Dann@Lean6SigmaPM.com.