For the majority of project personnel, in every project, on a hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis, you will find yourself communicating up to one manager or another. You will need to communicate either the project status or the status of your part of the project to your managers or even your managers managers. At these times, regardless of whether you are in an international project or a small, single location one, it is good to have some understanding of the kind of information, format of that information and level of detail you will need to provide to satisfy their needs.

Regardless of their proximity to you, no two managers expectations will be alike. Some will demand fine detail on everything on the project, others will require this level of data for only specific areas such as financial performance, schedule, risk profile etc, while only seeking high level data for the balance. While other managers may only require a high level report and expect you to report any issues on an exception basis, so, if everything other than one part of the project is on schedule, they will expect you to tell them that and then explain why you believe the problem area is off track and what the plan is to recover.

Key Issues When Communicating Up In Your Project

Where things can start to get complicated with international reporting is in the language of the report, the method of delivery and the size of the audience to whom it will be delivered.

* With language – does your project have a common language? If so, how proficient with that language are you and your manager? If you are presenting your report to a manager with similar language skills to yourself, you should be on reasonably firm ground since you will both have a similar level of understanding. However, if your manager has lesser language skills to yours, you need to be careful to structure your message in ways they can understand readily. There is no point in leaving your manager with the impression that you are simply trying to impress or belittle him through your linguistic skills, nor in writing a report that is so complex it is impossible to read. Likewise, if your language skills are lower than your manager, be careful that you actually understand what you are saying and that your manager gets all of the message he is looking for, in these situations it may help to have a colleague proof read your report or present at the meeting to act as an interpreter.

* Method of delivery – how are you going to present your report? The most common methods would be either in writing, via email, or via a telephone conversation. All methods can be relatively simple to conduct, but each comes with its own potential hidden traps. A written report delivered across a distance must be well crafted and easy to understand as it may well be the only regular information the manager receives. A written report in this circumstance may well be your only opportunity to ensure your manager gets everything he expects, nothing more, nothing less. For written reports, I would recommend agreeing a template ahead of time and sticking to the template as closely as possible for as long as the template is appropriate for the phase of the project. Telephone discussions have their own series of potential pitfalls, they are often conducted at odd hours of the day, and the nature of the telephone is that participants often fail to take the conversation as seriously as a face to face meeting or written report, again, here it is vital to have an agreed agenda and to stick to it.

* Size of the audience – The size of audience can have an enormous impact on the way the data is to be delivered. Here it is important to understand who is in the audience, their role in the project organisation chart, their interest and support for the project and their requirements for the data you are delivering. This can be a complex political activity,