Communication Management in Project Teams: Practices and Patterns

Many modern organizations carry out their business tasks using the project-based approach. Realization of projects requires appropriate management, which is of particular importance for the success of project implementation, and includes a number of areas, which are described in detail by many authors. One of the primary areas of project management is communication management, which is widely described in the literature, mainly due to the great importance that is attributed to this area of project management, and because of its impact on the success of the project, in particular IT projects carried out by dispersed teams. However, despite the existence of numerous sets of principles and methodologies concerning communication management and many available ICT tools and systems supporting this area, we are still witnessing many project failures or projects experiencing serious problems that result from improper communication management. The main goal of the paper is to identify real-life project communication management practices and accompanying factors described in subject literature, to summarize the collected information and use it in future research to develop a method of selecting the project communication management patterns most appropriate to the characteristics of a given project, the team and its environment. The study also reveals that ensuring proper and effective project communication it is not only a matter of preparing a communication plan, creating, collecting, distributing, storing project information, and identifying responsibilities for project team members and other project stakeholders, but also of having good personal contact with team members, developing positive relationships, and obeying fundamental rules of clear and positive communication.