Most project communication fails in a way that’s difficult to see from the inside. The updates go out on time. They’re accurate. Somebody has put real effort into them. And the people receiving them still can’t tell you what’s happening or what they’re meant to do about it.
That gap isn’t a writing problem. It’s a thinking problem that shows up as a writing problem.
The update is not the message
People confuse these two constantly. An update tells someone what happened. A message tells them what it means for them.
“Fitout is tracking two weeks behind” is an update. “You’ll be at your current desk through October, and we’ll confirm your new floor by the end of August” is a message. Same facts. Completely different value to the person reading it.
Plenty of steering committee packs are stuffed with updates that nobody in the room could translate into an action. They satisfy a reporting obligation and change nothing.
Start with the decision you want someone to make
Before writing anything on a project, work out what you want the reader to do differently once they’ve read it. Sometimes the answer is nothing, and they just need to stop worrying. That still counts.
On a hotel refurbishment, the guest doesn’t care about your program. They care whether the pool is open and whether they’ll hear drilling at seven in the morning. On an ERP rollout, the finance team doesn’t care about your migration approach. They care whether they can close the month.
The sector changes the vocabulary. It rarely changes the question.
Everyone is asking a version of the same thing
Am I affected. When. What do I have to do. Who do I call if it goes wrong.
Those four hold up on a tourism campaign, a stadium build, a national fundraising program and an office move. The vocabulary shifts between them. The questions don’t.
Where teams come unstuck is writing one message for everybody. A community group living next to a construction site and a client’s board have almost nothing in common except the project. Same facts, different message, different channel, different person delivering it.
Cadence does more work than content
Tell people when they’ll next hear from you, then turn up on that date, and you’ll buy an enormous amount of patience. Even when the news is poor.
A monthly note that runs three paragraphs and says very little still gets read, provided it arrives when it said it would. People aren’t reading it for the content. They’re checking whether the project is still under control.
Miss one and everybody assumes something has gone wrong. Usually they’re right.
Silence gets filled
This is the bit people underestimate. If you don’t explain a delay, someone else will, and their version will be worse than yours. You’ll then spend a fortnight correcting it instead of running your project.
A two week slip in a lease negotiation can become a redundancy rumour inside a few days without anybody doing anything malicious. Somebody sees a meeting in a calendar, mentions it to somebody else, and it grows from there.
Telling people early costs you one uncomfortable meeting. Telling them late costs you the benefit of the doubt for the rest of the job.
Who says it matters as much as what gets said
A message about job security from the project manager lands very differently to the same message from the executive who actually made the decision. Good communications fail regularly because the wrong name sits at the bottom.
Work out who has the standing to say it, then get them to say it in their own words rather than yours. If they won’t put their name to it, you’ve learned something useful about whether the message is true yet.
Four checks before anything goes out
Who is this for. Not “staff”, but which staff.
What do they need to decide, or stop worrying about.
Whose name belongs at the bottom.
When will they hear from us next, and is that date real.
If you can’t answer all four, it isn’t a message yet. It’s an update wearing a nicer font.
One question worth sitting with
Most project failures get written up afterwards as scope problems or schedule problems. Dig into them and they usually began with somebody assuming a message had landed when it hadn’t.
So, on whatever you’re running right now. If you stopped all formal communication tomorrow, how long before your stakeholders started inventing their own version of events?
For most of us it’s shorter than we’d like to admit.
This is the first in a series on project messaging. The pieces that follow go deeper on each idea: the four questions every stakeholder is actually asking, why cadence beats content, what happens when silence gets filled, and whose name goes at the bottom.
Ben Webb is an Australian project delivery leader, AIPM Project Manager of the Year 2022 and an IPMA World Project Manager of the Year nominee 2023. He writes about project delivery, leadership and the difference between managing a project and actually delivering one.
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