Plan and Manage Communication

PMI's communication model (sender, encode, message, medium, noise, decode, receiver, feedback) underlies a lot of scenario questions: a message can be sent correctly and still fail because of "noise" — cultural difference, jargon, or channel mismatch. Effective communication is confirmed by feedback, not by the act of sending.

Know the three methods: interactive (two-way, real-time — meetings, calls; best for anything ambiguous or urgent), push (sent to recipients, no confirmation they engaged — emails, reports; best for routine status), pull (recipient retrieves it themselves — a shared repository or wiki; best for large audiences or reference material). Exam questions often describe a failure ("stakeholders didn't act on an urgent email") and expect you to recognize a push method was used where interactive was needed.

Study focus: the classic formula — number of communication channels = n(n-1)/2 — still shows up in calculation-style questions about team-size complexity.