Let me explain this to you. Any entrepreneur, CEO or MD of a company would want to grow business exponentially through expansion and resource management. In the process, the work only gets obscene and therefore one would find project managers or group leads or team leads managing beyond their capacities, clients more than 10 or specialists more than 20 at times. That makes it 30 business relationships to manage. We all know it is not humanly possible for one person to run the show this way, delegation is important. Once work is delegated, monitoring is important. Likewise, managing resources, clients, documents and mainly the task or project in hand to make the business successful is something every manager struggles to cope with in work life.

With your latest acquisition of your gadgets and gizmos your 10 hours at office have now increased to 16 (perhaps) and taken your weekends too. Oh boy! What a life? You may think. Then again, you are happy because you have something to flaunt in your social circle which you probably wouldn’t have invested on otherwise.

At the end of the day, despite of all the luxuries your company has showered on you, what you are taking back home is Stress.

Have you ever wondered why? The answer to this is communication management. No matter how great interpersonal skills you may have but to manage, organize, discipline, delegate, monitor, track is not a ball game. Gadgets and gizmos have their limitations and too many of them only add to clutter. You need technology that is far superior to bridge communication and grow relationships.

With a realization of this basic understanding, half your stress will be gone. Really!

Communicate. Organize. Information. Three important rules of any business game.

If there is no communication, lack of communication or miscommunication, you will Assume (make an ass of you and me).

If there is free will to organize data or style of work, you will lose track and information.

Information, either excessive or scattered can bombard you and leave you in a dilemma

In my many years of work life, nothing has changed. There is clutter, too much information, different mind sets, miscommunication, wastage of time and more. Probably, in my next job I will see it happening all again.

I say stop. There is something called a communication and document management software that can help evade problem that every manager faces in work life. Tasktrek is one such recommended software that helps simplify work, encourages seamless communication, formulates standards or templates for team members to follow, minimizes communication channels to cut the clutter and keeps you updated anytime and anywhere. Other basics such as delegation of task, monitoring and reporting are other important in-built tools of this software.

I have not given up my Blackberry or laptop yet. The day this new age technology will spread its wings in the Indian business scenarios, there will be an environment friendly and stress free environment for sure. It is communication which ties in people, projects and fate of any business.

Preeti Juneja

Communications Consultant

In today’s world when people can communication through all sorts of media, chat clients, emails, social networks, telephones and what not, there is a need to bring all communication back into one one place. You cannot let the information be scattered all over the place or someone will end up in trouble, either by spending hours to look for what was agreed or biting the bullet and doing what was NOT agreed upon just because they cannot find the communication anywhere. Larger the projects, larger the penalty.

There can be no doubt as to the critical importance of effective communication management in terms of successfully facilitating not only the ultimate success of any particular project, but the meeting of criteria as far as planning, cost and deadlines are concerned. Most project managers would admit that around eighty percent of their time is spent communicating in one form or another with the various members and groups within the project team.

This means that a project manager has to manage communications effectively before being able to organize the smooth and efficient progress of any project. With a greater than ever number of people tending to be involved in large-scale projects and a far more diverse range of methods of communication, this is no small feat. Added to this is the very real probability that many of the related parties advising on or developing aspects of the project might be based many miles apart – even on different continents.

Another issue which will have to be addressed is the screening of communications, and this may also require a range of means by which data can be screened. Clearly, some communications will be of a more critical nature than others will, and it will be necessary for any communications management program to be capable of prioritizing information and ensuring that it is delivered to the right person, in the right format, and with the appropriate priority handling.

Naturally, it is not simply the collation and screening of communications which will need to be handled effectively, but the distribution of that information to the various parties who will need to be informed. Any project manager may admit to being partially little more than a glorified errand boy, passing notes from one party to another!

However, the complexity and dynamism involved in large scale, international projects can result very easily in breakdowns in communications, and it will be crucial for any project manager to know that the chosen system will be capable of handling multiple streams of information, in multiple formats, delivering that information to the right person, in the right format, and all taking into account the priority for each transmission. It’s a great deal to expect, but entirely necessary, since the likely success of any project is necessarily reduced the greater the frequency of communications errors, delays or failures. The importance of this issue makes the selection of software programs a fundamental issue in managing any project, especially a large-scale one.

Today we bring such a solution for people who would like everything back in one place, not only for project management, but for communication management, information management and once again be able to find everything in one place, which is simple enough to search.

A lot of tools are available, but they are far more complicated than what a small company would need, they only need a simple solution which brings the information required by any team member accessible when they need. Cut down on relying on emails to communicate and cut down on time spent on making people remind of what was already communicated to them.

The solution is going to be available very soon, i.e. by end of december, 2009. We shall keep updating this blog with the progress…

Effective communication means that each and every project team member should be fully apprised of the project status (at least on a macro level) at all times. Some detailed information may not be shared with all team members if they are very individual specific, but the big items should always be shared among the entire team. Communication can also take the form of regular updates to the assigning party as to status of the project and/or specific components of it.

Today a lot of tools exists which can help you and your team manage communication and effectivly be able to access that information whenever the need arrise.

We have checked and used a lot of tools in past, i shall write about our experience with different tools here soon.