Assessing Communication Quality and Stakeholder Performance

A reader who’s a risk manager on large physical infrastructure projects (tunnels, bridges, etc.) asked me the following question. “How do you evaluate the quality of coordination and communication between different stakeholders? And how do you track the performance of each stakeholder? (In both cases, stakeholders are teams, not individuals.)”

First, a disclaimer. I have never worked on large physical infrastructure projects. So, I will answer with my experience with other types of business projects with multiple stakeholder teams. That said, let’s answer the two questions.

Assessing Communication Quality

The single most effective way to track the quality of communication between stakeholders is to make, now and then, direct observations: attend calls, read emails, etc., and check whether the communication is honest and direct, whether problems are surfaced and addressed or hidden until it’s too late, whether people are proactive or reactive, etc.

Give particular attention to whether people focus on “ticking the box” or on “creating actual progress and derisking the project.”ShareCopy Examples of the former include progress updates that are a recap of what happened last week instead of being about possible obstacles and how to address them, problems that are raised and noted down instead of addressed, decisions that are routinely postponed to gather more information, focus on not hurting feelings instead of being upfront, etc.

Also, note whether the attitude is collaborative (“We’re all working together against the common enemy of delays, overbudgets, and low quality”) or adversarial (“We each have our agenda and they are negative-sum”).

Of course, there are other ways to track the quality of communication. Still, they are all either inferior to direct observations or complementary, and I would never use them instead of direct observations. That said, here is a short overview of them:

• Survey participants on the quality of meetings and communication. I profoundly dislike surveys because they are extremely superficial, and when they do surface problems, they seldom surface them with enough context to make them easily actionable.

• Measure response time metrics and decision velocity. This is not a terrible idea, but it does not substitute direct observations, and if you do direct observations, you will probably not need this.

• Track the rework ratio and change order frequency. In theory, this is good to track. In practice, it might invite hiding problems, and in general, it only surfaces problems once it’s too late.

• Track the ratio of issues resolved vs. escalated. Same as above.