Proposal assignment.

Write a proposal that promotes ideas for improving the project management communication at
your place of work. Detailed descriptions of project management communication strategies at
your place of business as they exist today.

I work in an international airline company that has gathered formidable reputation for being
one of the best airline companies in the United States. One of the reasons for its success is its
communication strategies that revolve around the external and internal stakeholders.
 Townhall meetings are conducted to address the high level and the low-level questions
from the airline employees and discuss about the developments and future plans of the
company.
 There is a Hierarchy chart that is attached to every project to communicate the chain of
command and the ladder towards approvals.
 Every project has a business case and a project charter to specify the internal and
external stakeholders in the project.
 Every project has a RACI chart that denotes who should be responsible, who should be
consulted, who is accountable and who should be informed as the project progresses.
 Each project will have a designated business owner, product owner, scrum master,
developers and testers. There could also be members from different teams with whom
there could be a dependency.

Area of Improvement – In the company I work in, the IT sprint teams do not conduct sprint
ceremonies like daily standup and Retrospectives efficiently due to the reason that most
team members are from offshore and there is a huge time difference because of which the
working hours of the team members do not match adding to the challenge.

I will be proposing four strategies on how to address this challenge.

Descriptions of project management communication strategies at other places of business;

Depending on scale of the company and the reason for the communications, various
companies would have adopted strategies for similar goals. For example;
Job Interviews; Depending on the company policies and the nature of the role, a company
could have adopted the following strategies;
 Face to Face interviews
 Interviews with an online questionnaire
 A video chat interview – as it is time efficient
 A telephonic interview, etc

Another example could be strategies that a business would follow in handling distributed
teams:
  Schedule skype meetings at a strategic time to accommodate teams in different
time zones.
 Primary mode of communicating could be though email, where important issues
can be addressed and approvals can be taken and documented, etc.
 Data and Document repositories like GiTHub, Sharepoint, Confluence can be used
to share and view documentation.

Three proposed new options for improved project management communication strategies,
showing the advantages and disadvantages of each.
Since the project is Agile and the problem is dealing with designing Scrum ceremonies for
the distributed team, I have the following proposal in dealing with this;

 1st Proposal – Deciding The time to accommodate the daily standups – The offshore
team is in office by 8am which is 4pm here in the US. The time difference is a
setback but I suggest having the daily standup at this time. The Standup can be brief
for 10 minutes and the remaining part of the time (20 mins) can be used to answer
queries and accommodate discussions.
Advantages –
o Standups can be made possible even though there is a time difference
o Members can feel like a part of the team considering the distance
separating them.
o Small issues and queries can be quickly be addressed and impediments /
roadblocks can be eliminated this way.

Disadvantages –

o The time difference can be a problem considering that the standup on site
is the previous day for the offshore team.
o Bigger issues that need to be addressed cannot be addressed in these time
slots
o Emergency bugs cannot be addressed in the non-working hours of one
team by the other

2Nd Proposal - Club the Sprint Review and the Retrospectives –

Advantages –

 Sprint Retrospectives can be accommodated along with the review meetings right
after the Demo, thereby making the meetings time efficient.
 Having Retros right after demos leading to a more fruitful retro as the events of the
sprint and the result (demo) are still fresh in everybody’s head.

Disadvantages –
 If the Review / Demo takes too long , this will affect the sprint Retrospective –
which will be forced to be completed in less time so that the on site team can leave
the office.