its not what you say, it's How (often) you say it

I have always been a woman of few words. My consulting work has been primarily hands-on as a system analyst and developer PM on smaller projects. I grew accustomed to a mostly solo SDLC process of:

1. interviewing to obtain and document requirements
2. drafting, sharing and updating a plan for approval to move forward
3. developing the programs/applications
4. completing a few iterations of testing, submitting and making modifications, and
5. providing final documentation and training users

That all changed when I accepted a contract with a Fortune 500 company PMO, or Project Management Office, on a retail inventory management system project. I had to adopt new practices that worked for a new type of project---an agile hybrid project.

For the next three years, I worked on a software development project as an Assistant Project Manager. During that time, I had to adjust to being a mostly "hands-off" Project Manager (though I did do some development in SharePoint and SQL Server).

I also had to adjust to an environment of daily scrums, as well as other group meetings, in which I did more talking and facilitating than I was normally accustomed. Nine out of every 10 of my meetings included the Product Owner and/or members of his organization. Our meeting tasks involved documenting requirements for training, security, auditing, quality assurance, making business process changes, and providing updates to all the other project team members.

Given that the stakeholder communications from our meetings were essential to keeping the project moving, I developed a disciplined system of recording and distributing action items from every meeting and following up until the tasks were completed or deemed unnecessary. So, although the technical challenges of the project impaired the speed of progress, at least everyone always knew about it, knew the reasons why, and what we were going to do about it.

Today, effective written and verbal communication is a high priority in every business relationship and every project that I lead or support. I am now a woman of many words.

Project Stakeholder Management and Communications Management are two PMI PMBOK knowledge areas I got to know well when studying for the PMI-ACP and PMP certification exams (passed!). I have volunteered with PMI on a few activities including service as chapter Director of Analytics, global awards reviewer and participating on a global team to translate and edit Brazilian Portuguese PMI documentation. pmi.org