In spite of the best intentions of sender and receiver to communicate, several barriers inhibit the effective exchange of information. As author George Bernard Shaw once wrote, "The greatest problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished." Executives estimate that 15 percent of their time is wasted due to poor communications with employees. This translates into approximately eight weeks per person each year.

If there's one thing that a project manager needs to do well it is communicate. Up the line, down the line, with peers, just about every hour of a project manager's day involves communication. As such, it is vitally important to understand the barriers that are likely to get in the way of effective communication. The following will discuss four pervasive problems in this section: perceptions, filtering, language, and information overload.

Perceptions

The perceptual process determines what messages we select or screen out, as well as how the selected information is organized and interpreted. This can be a significant source of noise in the communication process if the senders and receivers perceptions are not aligned. For example, a plant superintendent in a concrete block plant picked up a piece of broken brick while talking with the supervisor. This action had no particular meaning to the superintendent -- it was just something to toy with during the conversation. Yet as soon as the senior manager had left, the supervisor ordered a half-hour of overtime for the entire crew to clean up the plant. The supervisor mistakenly perceived the superintendents action as a signal that the plant was messy.

Filtering

Some messages are filtered or stopped altogether on their way up or down the organizational hierarchy. Filtering may involve deleting or delaying negative information, or using less harsh words so that events sound more favorable. Employees and supervisors usually filter communication to create a good impression of themselves for superiors. Filtering is most common where the organization rewards employees who communicate mainly positive information and among employees with strong career mobility aspirations.

Language

Words and gestures carry no inherent meaning, so the sender must ensure that the receiver understands these symbols and signs. In reality, lack of mutual understanding is a common reason why messages are distorted. Two potential language barriers are jargon and ambiguity.

Jargon
Jargon includes technical language and acronyms as well as recognized words with specialized meaning in specific organizations or social groups. For example, "Microspeak" jargon at Microsoft can potentially improve communication efficiency when both sender and receiver understand this specialized language. It also shapes and maintains an organizations cultural values as well as symbolizes an employees self-identity in a group.

However, jargon can also be a serious communication barrier. A while back Newbridge Networks president Pearse Flynn discovered that jargon was a form of technical snobbery that prevented some employees from receiving important knowledge and undermined relations with customers. Jargon was also a problem at Wacker Siltronic Corp. Employees were breaking saw blades and causing a high rate of product defects after new machinery was introduced. Management eventually discovered that the manuals were written for engineers, and that employees were guessing (often incorrectly) the meaning of the jargon. Productivity improved and machine costs dropped after the manuals were rewritten without the jargon.

Ambiguity
We usually think of ambiguous language as a communication problem because the sender and receiver interpret the same word or phrase differently. If a co-worker says, "Would you like to check the figures again?" the employee may be politely telling you to double-check the figures. But this message is sufficiently ambiguous that you may think that the co-worker is merely asking if you want to do this. The result is a failure to communicate.

Ambiguous language is sometimes used deliberately in work settings to avoid conveying undesirable emotions. CEOs sometimes refers to the "integration process" with other companies. This sounds better than the "m" words of merger and monopoly. Microsoft doesn't warn computer users about fatal software ercors; they're "undocumented behaviours." And when millions of Microsoft Network customers suffered through significant e-mail delivery problems, the company described the incident as "a partial e-mail delay." Why the obfuscation? Customers tend to respond more calmly to integration processes, undocumented behaviors, and partial e-mail delays than to monopolies, fatal software errors, and e-mail lost for weeks or forever.

Ambiguous language may be a barrier, but it is sometimes necessary where events or objects are ill defined or lack agreement. Corporate leaders often use metaphors to describe complex organizational values so that they are interpreted broadly enough to apply to diverse situations. Scholars also rely on metaphors because they convey rich meaning about complex ideas. For example, some organizational behavior scholars compare organizations to "jazz ensembles" or "machines" to reflect different variations of their complex nature.

Information Overload

Every day, Dave MacDonald is flooded with up to 100 e-mail messages. The Xerox executive is also bombarded with voice mail, faxes, memos, and other pieces of information. "Without some kind of system in place, I'd spend practically all my time trying to sort through it and not get much of anything else done," says MacDonald.

Dave MacDonald is not alone. Office workers send and receive 100+ e-mails, phone calls, voice mails, faxes, paper documents, and other messages each day! "One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live in a state of information overload," predicted communications guru Marshall McLuhan decades ago. "There's always more than you can cope with."

Information overload occurs when the volume of information received exceeds the person's capacity to process it. Employees have a certain information processing capacity, that is, the amount of information that they are able to process in a fixed unit of time. At the same time, jobs have a varying information load, that is, the amount of information to be processed per unit of time.

Information overload creates noise in the communication system because information is overlooked or misinterpreted when people cannot process it fast enough. Moreover, it has become a common cause of workplace stress. One survey reports that two-thirds of managers blame information overload for interpersonal conflicts and dissatisfaction at work, and 43 percent say that they suffer from "paralysis of analysis" due to the volume of information they must process."

Information overload is minimized in two ways: by increasing our information processing capacity and by reducing the job's information load. We can increase information processing capacity by learning to read faster, scanning documents more efficiently, and removing distractions that slow information processing speed. Time management also increases information processing capacity. When information overload is temporary, information processing capacity can increase by working longer hours.

We can reduce information load by buffering, summarizing, or omitting information. Buffering occurs where assistants screen the persons messages and forward only those considered to be essential reading. Summarizing condenses information into fewer words, such as by reading abstracts and executive summaries rather than the entire document. Omitting is the practice of ignoring less important information. For example, some e-mail software programs have a filtering algorithm that screens out unwanted junk mail (called "spam").

Perceptions, filtering, language, and information overload are not the only sources of noise in the communication process, but they are probably the most common. Noise also occurs when we choose an inappropriate channel to send the message. The next section takes a closer look at communication channels.

Project managers often feel like they have no power. And in fact, they typically don't have any in the traditional sense of the word i.e. they don't have managerial responsibility over the people they are trying to coordinate. However, project managers do finish projects so what sort of power do they have over people in their organizations?

This post builds on the fundamental principle that many of the challenges stem from the fact that project management is not the primary purpose of organizations, and never will be. Companies are created, structured and run primarily to deliver operational products and services. Projects, however, are still critical to the business success of these organizations - in creating, enhancing, replacing and retiring products and services in response to competitive and market demands. The challenge, then, is to arrive at an approach to managing projects in organizations that can co-exist with their current operational focus. This series addresses the practical steps that organizations can and must take to successfully create an effective project management capability.

The concept of management by projects is a non-starter. The average company is not a project-driven company, and likely never will be. So why is this an idea that continues to be so prevalent? What problems -- real or perceived -- do it's proponents hope to address? And if the project-driven organization cannot exist, what business model will surface that will reasonably address these problems? This series takes an in depth look at these questions, and offers insightful and reasoned answers.

I received an e-mail from a visitor to my site who described the following situation:

Hope you're fine. I was wondering if you could possibly help me. I'm a final year project management student currently undertaking a university research project as my final year assignment. I was shocked to see that so many methodologies actually exist as we have only been taught Prince2. My question is, what would be an ideal methodology for me to undertake in regards to a university project on children with asthma? My university has received funding from an organization called [company name removed] and we want to create an Expert Patient Program for young children with asthma. This will be done by conducting a number of workshops and drawing conclusions from the children's views. Any ideas?

In a previous post, we discussed the reality that while the practice of project management may continue to advance, overall project results will not significantly improve until better decisions are made through the full lifecycle of an idea. One of the most significant barriers to improvement, however, is the comprehension of what this lifecycle represents in terms of stages -- and where the responsibility for decisions resides in each stage.

The road to organizational change is an odd one: both well traveled and unfamiliar at the same time. The intensity of resistance, the many bumps and potholes and the sense of isolation all too often lead one to surmise that the road is one seldom traveled. It is easy to assume that few have passed this way, and those that have had not too easy a time of it. Certainly no easier than ourselves as we face it today as if for the first time.

An emerging theme that I have encountered in conversations of late is the perception that project management is becoming the latest management fad. Interestingly, my reaction has ranged from "Is it?" to "Already?" to "Why did it take this long?" For someone who has been on the inside of promoting and developing project management as a corporate competency, it is easy to develop the impression that this is the way things have always been done. Objectively stepping back, however, project management as a formal discipline is a much newer concept for many organizations.

The concept of management by projects is a non-starter. The average company is not a project-driven company, and likely never will be. So why is this an idea that continues to be so prevalent? What problems -- real or perceived -- do it's proponents hope to address? And if the project-driven organization cannot exist, what business model will surface that will reasonably address these problems? This series takes an in depth look at these questions, and offers insightful and reasoned answers.

I recently got through the book, The Blind Men and the Elephant by David Schmaltz. The sub-heading of this book is "mastering project work". That, along with recommendations from others, prompted me to buy the book expecting to read about processes and techniques for managing projects. That's not quite what I got.