Channels of Communication

You already know that 90% of a Project Manager’s job is communication but do you do all the communication that there is on the project? Who all in your project need to talk to each other rather than routing through you? Is a Tester required to speak to one of the Development Managers? Does the Business Analyst need to speak to the Deployment Team?

While all this can totally overwhelming, still the Project Manager need to count the channels of communication and keep this number handy.

Let’s say there are a total of 3 people in the project including you – A, B and C. So in this case,

A –> B
A –> C
B –> C

These are the only 3 lines of communication that covers all scenarios. But what if you had 6 people in the project. Can you draw something similar? Warning: It can get overwhelming!

Luckily, there is a formula to handle it,

# lines of communication for n people = n * (n-1) / 2

So for 6 people,

# lines of communication for 6 people = 6 * (6-1) / 2 = 15

Don’t forget to check out the video above for additional examples

Check more articles on Communications Management