MANAGEMENT

Managing Communications, Knowledge and Information: Case of Crossrail Project

Table of Contents

Introduction3

Task I3

Task II6

Stakeholders of the Project6

Task III7

Communication Channel Review7

Advice to CEO7

Task IV8

Task V9

References11

Managing Communications, Knowledge and Information

Introduction

Crossrail Limited (CRL) is a subsidiary of Transport for London and is responsible for delivering the Crossrail project, which is Europe's largest civil engineering tunnel project. The company was set up in 2001 to develop vital commuter links for people and businesses throughout the southeast and supports regeneration projects throughout the region. Crossrail is CRL's most significant project since the Jubilee Line Extension and Channel Tunnel Rail Link and will see new Crossrail stations built along the central route of Paddington, Tottenham Court Road, Bond Street, Farringdon, Whitechapel, Liverpool Street and Canary Wharf. The stations will link routes from Maidenhead and Heathrow in the west to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east. This paper in connection to the Crossrail project will provide answer of four tasks. The first task will explain the various information and knowledge that the British government needed that helped make the decision. Moreover, the paper will also furnish explanation about what decisions needed to be taken after the government agreed in principle to the scheme? The second task will identify the stakeholders who should have been involved in the decision making process, and will elucidate how did Crossrail identify and maintain the involvement of stakeholders. In the third task the official website of the project will be analysed from the perspective of communication design.

Task I

Relying on theories of uncertainty reduction and information management, government of England has addressed questions concerning how individuals come to understand their organizational roles. Using the seminal work by Shannon and Weaver (1949), whose mathematical theory of communication postulates that as information increases, freedom of choice and uncertainty decrease, Berger and Calabrese (1975) proposed uncertainty reduction theory to explore how individuals respond to uncertainty (lack of predictability), especially in initial interactions with strangers. From these interpersonal communication roots, uncertainty theories have been applied especially to the process of employees/workers/stakeholders managing uncertainty as they join project and interact with others. Factor analysis results identified a range of strategies newcomers in Crossrail project use to reduce their uncertainty: (a) overt questions in which the target of uncertainty is queried, (b) indirect questions in which hinting or non-interrogative questions are used, (c) third-party inquiry in which someone other than the source of uncertainty is questioned, (d) testing limits in which perceived norms are violated to see the reactions, (e) disguising conversations in which topics are discussed without direct inquiries, (f) observing for specific information, and (g) surveillance, a more general monitoring for available information (Miller & Jablin, 1991). It has been identified that the sources government of Britain uses to reduce uncertainty regarding the project, including coworkers, supervisors, subordinates, friends, partners, and family (Teboul, 1994). Certain sources are preferred for certain types of information. For example, newcomers in the project preferred to receive technical information from their supervisors but preferred peers for information about group norms (Morrison, ...