Improving Communication in IT Project Management through Agile Methodology

Communication as a leading cause of delay in project completion

Communication is one of the main causes of failure in success or delays caused in completion of a project. A good flow of communication is required within different teams internally as well as clear and up-to-date communication with the higher management such as, stakeholders, project owners, sponsors, etc. This research and paper will discuss the difference needed from the current form of communication to a more effective way of communication following an Agile methodology environment in an organization and what would be the best ways/tools to conduct such effective communication.

Directions for Refining Your Research Topic: Conduct research and narrow or broaden your topic to focus on a specific PM research need, complete the table below. Repeat the process until you have achieved below 30 results to research. Add more rows as needed.

Review the following resources and provide responses to the following questions. Your responses should be at least 100 words in length and contain paraphrased content and citations. 

Question 1:  Discuss which of the resources from Section 1 was most helpful to you and how it helped frame your topic.

The resources above have helped narrow down my topic. I had chosen “Communication” but it was a very vast topic. The above resources helped me focus on communication with agile methodology in Information Technology industry.

1) Always use important key terms in order to narrow down your search such as “Communication”, “Agile”, “Project Management”, etc.

2) Use pouplar key words and then read or go through the search results, this will help in getting a more clear path and new ideas or key words to look into. This will also help in broadening your thought process.

3) Focus on narrowing down the research by adding new search terms and bring the search result number down to as small as possible so your end set of results is more focused on your topic of choice.

Question 3: List and describe three insights that you have noted about your research topic through this exercise Limit your response to specifically to your topic, NOT the research process.  

1.Form of communication is different based on what type of project is it and withing what industry. Diferent methodologies are also considered when looking into the correct form of communication such as agile, lean or scrum

2. Another insight I gathered is, who the communication is between. There is a difference in how and when things need to be communicated based on who the communicatopn is taking place between for example if it is between internal teams, communicating updates to higher management or communication with clietns/third party sourcing.

Agile methodology as an approach to improving communication

3. I also noticed communication is a major problem in project management as deploying or planning for a project is just the intital stage but communication is step that takes place frequently and throughout the projects completion cycle. Any error in planning, can be fixed but once something is not communicated or communicated wrongly, will take a lot of time to fix which can have a huge affect on the project.

Question 4: How can your proposed topic add to the existing body of knowledge in project management?

Companies and project leaders are very aware that communication is a leading cause of delay or error caused in projects. Unfortunately, unlike planning or project proposal communication is not placed on a piece of paper where the fault can be located and fixed. For example – if there is a error in the budget, the amount would be different and the report would state that. This will help to raise the concern and get the issue or eror fixed, but in communication that is not case. A lot of training and the right flow of communication needs to be tested based on projects and in which industry in order to find the correct flow. There are a lot of strategies and tools that can be used to figure the right form as well. In this paper, we will be discussing on what is the current way of communication in IT projects and how it can be improved.

Question 5: Name 3 to 5 identified gaps in the existing literature or recommendations for future research? (These are often found in the conclusion section of articles and research studies)

Discover or research how company culture or work plays a role in better understanding on how information can be communicated from the development stage in order to face any challenges.

Question 6: Based on this research and any preliminary research, describe the focus of your research paper.

The focus of my resatch paper is on “Communication in IT Projects”. The paper will discuss the current form of communication and how it can be improved in agile business environment or culture. The paper will also recommend a few strategies and tools in order to make sure what is the best form of communication. Three ways of communication will be divided as follows

Internal Teams 2

Higher Management

Virtual Teams (third party sourcing or remotely located teams)

List at least 5 references used in APA format: