Communication considerations

We spend 90 percent of our time as project managers communicating. My guess is that during the other 10 percent, we are seeking a quiet room to eat lunch in, but the fact remains that we communicate a lot! Whether it's via email, conference calls, meetings about previous and future meetings, Skype or WebEx types of communication, performance reporting, and informal communication with our coworkers, we are regularly communicating. The larger the group or team, the more communication channels you will have. I look at this as how many ways my message can go wrong. There isn't just one channel of communication; there is a feedback loop in which we hope our message was understood, and the other party or parties respond with what they think they understood, and around and around it goes. For example, if I use the communications channels formula of N(N-1)/2, where "N" represents the number of people I will be communicating with, and you subtract...