When it comes to project management, effective communication is key to successful projects. Project management strategies not only help teams hit deadlines on time, but they also ensure the quality of the work and keep the necessary stakeholders in the loop.
Project managers have a language all their own, with specific terms that will be familiar to most teams. Knowing what they mean and where they sit in the scope of the project will help simplify communication and make expectations easier to understand.
Key project management terms to know
There are a few keywords that are often used throughout a project’s life cycle. They include:
Milestones
A significant point of time or event on a project. Hitting milestones are a great cause for celebration.
Baselines
Once the plan is approved, it’s important to baseline it. During the project, changes will occur. Scope, budget, timing, or quality will sometimes need adjustments, causing the baseline to be revisited.
Triple Constraint
Balancing time, cost, and scope so that quality is maintained and the project stays on track.
Gantt Chart
A graphical display of the schedule information. It includes dates and durations for deliverables.
CCB
CCB, or the Change Control Board is a group of stakeholders that are designated in the project plan to review and evaluate changes. Project managers typically need to go to the CCB to adjust anything related to the project that affects time, quality of budget.
Stakeholders
Stakeholders are those that are actively involved in the project. Stakeholders have a vested interest in the project and could be anything from company employees to end-users.
Change Management
A project management plan that includes processes on who does what/when/where.
Risk Mitigation
A bit different from risk management. Risk management is a plan. Risk mitigation is identifying the risk but also coming up with a mitigation strategy that can be deployed if threats occur on the project. Risk mitigation reduces the risk itself and allows teams to have a set way to handle issues as they arise so that projects don’t get derailed.
Why communication is important
Communication is important between project managers and team members because projects often hinge on hitting milestones and mitigating risk. If team members aren’t clear what the milestones are, what they entail, or have a sense of the constraints around each one, they’ll find it hard to do their job. What’s more, because projects can and do often change everything from deadlines to scope, if team members are left out of the loop, projects can quickly derail.
It’s important, then, to have a clear strategy as to how teams can communicate with each other, and project managers, so that projects can stay on track and milestones continue to be hit.
How to help teams communicate effectively throughout a project
The good news is that project managers have dozens of tools at their disposal to help their teams communicate effectively. Popular communication tools include:
- Asana
- Slack
- Monday
- Basecamp
Slack in the last few years has become an incredibly successful tool that helps teams communicate well via “channels” that can be divided out according to tasks, milestones, or projects.
It’s also a useful tool for agile project managers who utilize software such as Jira to run sprints and track bugs.
How Bitband can help
Bitband has created a Slack + Jira plugin to help project managers communicate better with both teams and stakeholders. With Bitband, project managers can:
- Customize Slack notification messages and group notifications with Slack threads
- Instantly create new Slack Channels linked to Jira issues without ever leaving Jira
- Have all comments and events associated with issues automatically shared in Slack channels
- Trigger notifications with more than 20 events and fine-tune with JQL
- Monitor an entire project or an entire instance
- Send information to Slack channels, private channels, and direct messages
- Filter notifications by priority, component, resolution, labels, status, type, assignee, reporter, sprint
- Provide detailed info on all notifications, including user, event, field names, updated data, and more
- Enable new Slack slash commands to get, create, and transition Jira issues
With Bitband, using Slack to communicate with teams on Jira has never been easier.
If you are a project manager and are looking for smart solutions that help you use Jira more effectively, we’re here to help. Drop us a line and we can show your team how to use Jira more effectively.
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