How to set up the best construction project communication plan
Communication is one of the most important factors to success in construction business. No wonder, businesses with effective communication systems usually have higher success rates. The bigger the construction project is, the more you need efficient communication systems. Therefore, the first step for your business to be productive and achieve better outcomes is to adopt an efficient communication plan. This post discusses how you can identify and communicate with key stakeholders.
The stakeholders
From the onset, you should always come up with a list of all stakeholders in your project. Stakeholders refer to people involved in your project like an architect, engineer, clients, service providers, and many others.
Once you have this list, you can create various topics that you think need to be communicated to all the stakeholders. The general topics include accomplishments, significant changes, project progress, budget status, and many others.
Communication items
After creating the key communicating themes and needs of each stakeholder, you can start doing a breakdown to implement the communication plan. At this point, it’s important to list and rank each of the communication items that have an impact on the success of the construction project.
Then you can do the regular items which are repeated daily or weekly. Lastly, you can create occasional items like reporting of unanticipated situations throughout the construction project.
Aside from this, you should set a suitable way to accomplish the result of each communication item. Hence, you can choose to communicate through announcements, interpersonal, reports, or meetings. But the communication ways will usually depend on the environment of your construction project.
Responsibilities
An effective construction project communication plan should show the team member responsible for sending messages. This means at each stage there should be someone to communicate depending on each situation. Also, there should be a frequency for communicating each item, meaning this can be weekly, weekly, or occasionally.
Remember that you need to find the right channel that you can use, such as e-mail, text message, direct communication, or any other methods. While designating these responsibilities, you should also identify the person who will be sending and receiving each item of communication. Simply put, you need to determine who will be responsible for sending the message, in what way, and to whom. However, you can only visualize the various situations and consider the available resources and the environment.
In the construction industry, people usually work in two different environments, which are the construction site and office. While most of the costs and activities happen at construction sites, many companies’ decisions are done in the office. Therefore, it’s necessary to align the people to make collaboration easy regardless of the distance.
The good news is that there is the availability of mobile devices and apps to help you communicate not only quickly. Even better, you can also send a greater amount of information to the team members. When sending such important information, it makes sense to record everything for reference and evaluation in the future. For example, you can use the recorded communication between the office and the construction site in the scheduled meetings.
