Project communication: Enhancing the communication practices of a design team to achieve project success

Abstract

Researchers in the past have shown that communication is integral to successful results in a project's design phase. This is said so as there are multiple professionals from diverse backgrounds who come together to prepare a project's design. Consequently, communication between these professionals becomes a key component as it is the way they share project information apart from sharing their knowledge and thoughts at this stage. However, the relationship between communication and project success is not well defined, particularly the understanding of the barrier and drivers of communication in a design team seems obscure. Thus, this research builds on this theme and tries to understand project communication in detail. By examining the communication practices of a design team through the lens of literature, this study aims to describe how communication affects the project outcome and specify ways to improve it. To fulfill this objective, this research is divided into three parts. In part A, the literature is reviewed to gain insights and reflect on the attributes that describe the communication of a design team and explain the influence of these attributes on project success. In part B, a document review is done to analyze the documents produced by a design team that provide guidelines for the team's communication practices for project success. In part C, semi-structured interviews are conducted to obtain empirical data explaining the communication practices followed by the team while working on a project. Following this, the results obtained from the three parts are compared, which helps identify the gaps in literature and the guidelines contained in the documents on the communication practices to be used by the team.
The results of this study suggest that communication is the central aspect that controls the functioning of the team. Communication practices impacts the team's collaboration, coordination, project performance, and quality of the work produced by the team. The impact of communication practices on these aspects of a project is categorized under two categories: drivers and barriers of communication. Based on these, recommendations for improving communication practices and mitigating barriers to project success are made and validated with experts. The study concludes with discussions on how adapting lean principles can bring many benefits to a team in the form of focus in meetings, minimizing transaction time of sharing information and developing a feedback culture. Also, these discussions describe that when working on a complex project, using a recommendation framed in this research; a team can mitigate various challenges associated with groupthink.