Communication skills constitute one of the most important skills for the effective project management. Good communications skills play a vital role in project management. Poor or lack of communication skills results in a delay or project failures (Sodhi, 2008).
Project managers spend an enormous amount of time with individuals and group of people and practical implementations state that project managers spend about 85% of their time communication-related tasks. A project manager with great relational abilities winds up intensifying the effectiveness of everybody he connects with.
This extraordinarily improves the probability of his project meeting or the expectations of external stakeholders (Kerzner, 2013). Communication skills along with an effective way of communicating with team members are one of the critical factors that drive for the success of the project.
After a brief analysis of the given case study, I can come up with an argument that Herb is not the right person to be assigned as a project manager. Though Herb has about eight plus years of experience working for projects, it is not a wise decision to assign Herb as a project manager because all his experience is into research and development and product enhancements.
He can be assigned as a manager of R & D in the current role by which he would gain the experience of project management tasks as they could be useful for him in future (BAGEIS & Fortune, 2009).
Since Alice was expecting a letter of recommendation from Herb, this can be a communication issue of decoding. Bob wanted to happen all the communication flow to his team through him in a written format, this is a communication issue of encoding. Betty was asked to estimate the cost of procurement but not to decide on it and this can be a communication issue of feedback. The communication issue with Frank includes all the above three.
References
BAGEIS, ABDULRAHMAN SALEM; FORTUNE, CHRIS. Construction Management & Economics. Jan2009, Vol. 27 Issue 1, p53-71. 19p. 1 Diagram, 16 Charts. DOI: 10.1080/01446190802596220.
House, R.J. (1996). Path-goal theory of leadership: Lessons, legacy, and a reformulated theory. Leadership Quarterly. 7 (3): 323-352.
Kerzner, H. (2013). Project management: A systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
ManMohan S. Sodhi; Byung-Gak Son. In: Interfaces. 38(2):140-146; The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), 2008.