Anyone who has worked with project management systems knows that the way you display data can dramatically affect the decisions people make from it. This is why we often see Gantt charts with critical activities in red. I'm reminded of one of my very first sales of project scheduling software back in the '80s. I don't dare share the name of the organization but it was a large utility. We'd made this sale a few days earlier and now I got a call for "technical assistance."

Project management is a tough job. Where else would you be expected to manage something that is temporary, has not been done before, is loosely defined, is constantly changing, is laden with complexity risk and unrealistic expectations and is set within fixed constraints including resources, budget, time, process, organisation and culture?

Projects depend very much on the team and teamwork. One of the fundamental roles of the project manager is to provide feedback to team members on their performance. Feedback is supposed to show someone the impact of their behaviour with a view to helping them improve performance in the future.

At one time the notion of a communication plan in project management consisted of whatever the project manager was willing to share with you. Back in the days when project management was synonymous with project scheduling and the primary industries that used project management were construction and defense, and heavy industry, the project manager's word was law and whatever he (or she) decided to report, that was it. Output from the scheduling department might be a simple list of key target dates or perhaps a summary bar chart written by a draftsman and annotated all over the page.

Any study on project failure will list poor stakeholder communication as one of the top three reasons for a project's demise. This brief case study discusses the steps I took to revive project stakeholder communications and move a group of stakeholders from intense distrust to frequent (and pleasant) collaboration.

Background: This web application redesign project for the military had petered to a low level grind, characterized by tersely worded emails, accusations and entrenched opinions. Project status meetings were held monthly, and sometimes skipped. There were no other recurring communications.Following please find key steps I used to shift this group to collaboration.