You sent the email. You explained the requirement. Everyone nodded in the meeting. And yet, two weeks later, people have interpreted the message differently. Communication models aren't just academic diagrams: they give project managers different lenses for diagnosing why communication isn't landing.
You sent the email. You explained the requirement. Everyone nodded in the meeting. And yet, two weeks later, people have interpreted the message differently. Communication models aren't just academic diagrams: they give project managers different lenses for diagnosing why communication isn't landing.
Models of communication are ways of understanding how communication flows between individuals and groups. There are lots of ways to improve project communication, and understanding some of the theory really helps.
So how do we take communication theory and make it practical for projects? The table below shows where you can take a model and apply it to a problem at work.
The Shannon-Weaver model is actually taught on Project Management Professional (PMP) training courses.
Most useful for: Understanding what is getting in the way of the message.
This model looks at the communication process. There is an information source (person) that is translated by the transmitter (email/phone etc) which the receiver receives and then decodes at their end. The process can get interrupted by noise (disruptions in the process e.g. poor signal, language barrier etc).
In context
- Topic: Proyectos, PMO y Riesgos — Gestión de proyectos, oficinas de proyecto y riesgo del portafolio.
- Source: Rebel's Guide to PM
- Published: 24/08/2026
Continue reading at the original source →
Excerpt published automatically by the site radar. The full text belongs to its publisher and is linked above.
Why it matters
A project management office is worth the decisions it makes possible, not the reports it produces. Once the PMO becomes the function chasing status updates, it has already lost: the team learns to fill in the template and the real information goes back to travelling through the corridors.
My filter is the quality of the status report. If every project is green, the reporting system is not working: in any real portfolio some initiatives are in trouble, and a healthy organisation surfaces them in time rather than discovering them at the closure committee.
What usually goes wrong
The classic mistake is treating risk management as a deliverable of the planning phase. The matrix gets built, approved, filed. Nobody opens it again until closure, when it serves to document that the risk was foreseen — which is exactly the opposite of managing it.
What to watch
- How it was estimated and how close the same organisation's previous estimates turned out to be.
- Who the sponsor is and how often they actually show up — not on the org chart, in the calendar.
- Whether the status report shows any red projects: an all-green portfolio is a portfolio without information.
How I read this entry
If this landed on my desk, the first thing I would ask for is not percentage complete: it is the list of pending decisions with a name and a date. A percentage can be dressed up; a decision stuck for three weeks with an identified owner cannot be argued with, and it explains the delay far better.
This entry is an excerpt from the original source, selected by the site radar. The commentary above is the site's own and does not belong to the cited publisher.
Living through this in your own team?
Open the chat and tell me how you're handling it. I'm interested in comparing notes.
