How Project Managers Can Be Brief and Know Their Message Is Clear

Project managers need an approach for reducing noise in their messages. The burden of effective communication is on the sender, not the receiver.

FINESSE is a linear communication approach that places the burden of an effective message on the sender, not the receiver. Most project managers, like any technically trained professional, do a below-average job of ensuring that their message is clear. Here are a few tips on how to be brief and make sure the message is clear.

Typical Approaches

Most technically trained professionals simply do a spell check and grammar check of their Word documents. Some do a similar spelling and grammar check of their Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. Few technical professionals fully leverage the editing tools or consistently apply the techniques to Google, Adobe, or social media applications.

The good news is that the tools are similar across all platforms. Our biggest challenges are awareness, creating a practical methodology, and consistently applying it.

Get Your Method Established Using Word

In Microsoft Word, we are all aware of the Review | Editor sequence that allows us to check our spelling and grammar. Make sure you use the full Editor toolbar (usually on the far left of the Review menu bar) and make the recommended refinements for clarity, conciseness, punctuation, and vocabulary.

Microsoft Office Suite includes the tools that project managers need to reduce noise in their reports and presentations.

Make the spelling and grammar changes because Microsoft is rarely wrong. I recommend making all of the refinement changes, too. These are suggestions, but Microsoft is usually correct here, too.

Remember that a disagreement between you and Microsoft is not really the point. The point is what makes the communication most clear for the receiver. Microsoft has the edge when it comes to the number of people who created the tool and the range of audiences that were used in the tool's development.

Word Count

The number of words can be viewed under Review | Word Count (normally just to the right of the Editor button) or can be seen continually on the bottom left of your Word screen when a document is open.

Documents that are between 500 and 1000 words are universally considered scannable. This is a normal range that I prefer to use for executive summaries, brief articles with a couple of key messages, and most blog posts.

Between 1500 and 2000 words, it is certainly time to take a look at the structure. Some key questions to ask include

1. Am I trying to make too many points?

2. Am I using too many examples?

3. Do I need a main body and an executive summary?

I do not worry about reading time as long as I am under 1500 words. There are many applications and algorithms that estimate reading time, and most will come up in the range of 1 minute for 400 to 500 words and something closer to 4 or 5 minutes in the 1500 to 2000 words range.

Word Count and Spoken Words

Great communicators focus on the correlation of word count to speaking time. This is probably the most important aspect of writing your remarks before you make an oral presentation, regardless of how good a natural speaker you happen to be.

My rule of thumb is that 1200 words correlate to 10 minutes of speaking time.

This heuristic means that if I give a summary to a board or commission, I will try to limit my remarks to 10 minutes or 1200 words of text. For a 30-minute presentation at a conference, I will target 2500 words of text because I want to talk for no more than 20 minutes and allow for 10 minutes of questions.

For questions (of all types and all forums), I target between 150 and 250 words (or 1 to 2 minutes). It is amazing how effective your answers to questions are with this approach. And with practice, you will develop an internal clock for knowing whether your answer is starting to get too long.

Readability and Insights

The word count discussion is also related to readability. In Word, go to the Insights button located in the Editor summary. Here you will find things like the number of words per sentence, sentences per paragraph, Flesch–Kincaid (F–K) reading grade level, and Flesch readability.

Editing tools such as Grammarly and other applications offer a wealth of resources to reduce noise. Awareness, a specific approach, and discipline are needed for consistent implementation.

Reducing the noise now becomes an integrated exercise. Target keeping your words per paragraph in the 2 to 3 range and under 20 words per sentence. Flesch readability of 50 is a good target, but 35 is not a bad score for technical presentations with a highly educated audience. A reading grade level of 8 is about right for most presentations with technical information.

I use the number of syllables per word as the most effective parameter for pulling the readability insights into a targeted range. You can calculate the number of syllables per word from the Flesch readability score, but you will need a different application to see this parameter directly. My target is 80 percent of the words having less than three syllables.

Applying It with FINESSE

I am over 800 words now, so it is time to wrap it up. The burden of effective communication is on the sender, not the receiver. The good news for project managers and other technically trained professionals is that there are many default tools for reducing the noise in your reports and verbal presentations.

These are a few ways I ensure my message is clear. Hopefully, they will inspire you to develop your own or modify your current approach. Are you Communicating with FINESSE?

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The elements of the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram® are Frame, Illustrate, Noise reduction, Empathy, Structure, Synergy, and Ethics.

The N in FINESSE stands for Noise reduction.

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JD Solomon Inc. provides solutions for facilitation, asset management, and program development at the nexus of facilities, infrastructure, and the environment.

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JD Solomon is the founder of JD Solomon, Inc., the creator of the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram®, and the co-creator of the SOAP criticality method^©. He is the author of Communicating Reliability, Risk & Resiliency to Decision Makers: How to Get Your Boss’s Boss to Understand and Facilitating with FINESSE: A Guide to Successful Business Solutions.

How to Communicate Asset Useful Life for Better Decisions

In practice, we want to estimate “remaining useful life” to forecast future renewal and replacement (R&R) needs.

Communicating “asset life” is far harder than it looks. The term sounds universal, yet accountants, engineers, and operations leaders often mean entirely different things when they use it. When organizations fail to reconcile them, capital plans become unrealistic, maintenance strategies drift, and leadership loses confidence in the numbers. When we communicate asset life clearly and contextually correctly, we create shared understanding and decisions that hold up in the real world.

Summary of Asset Life in Plain Terms

The goal is to see why each life exists and integrate them into decisions.

• Mean life is statistical and shows inherent reliability.

• Useful life is accounting-related and guides financial recovery.

• Service life reflects operational reality.

Three Ways to Look at Asset Life

An Example from a Wastewater Utility

A 20-year horizon is a strategic document used for capital planning. Basing it solely on mean life (the technical reliability limit) or useful life (an accounting term) often results in a "front-loaded" or unrealistic budget, as it assumes every asset is replaced the moment its theoretical life ends. Using service life may raise questions about whether the asset will experience unplanned breakdowns and related poor-quality or non-compliance issues.

Operational Reality: Assets often stay in service beyond their design life through strategic maintenance.

Budget Smoothing: Using service life allows you to "level out" variations in renewal needs, creating a more sustainable 20-year expenditure profile.

Cyclical Renewals: For long-term forecasts, you must account for assets with short lives (e.g., HVAC controls or carpets) that will be replaced multiple times within the 20-year window. A modified useful life based on mean life and context-specific O&M experience best captures these operational cycles. This term is best framed as "remaining useful life."

The Parking Lot Example

Here is how those three timelines play out for a standard asphalt parking lot.

1. Useful Life (Accounting) ~ 15 Years

Standard accounting practices generally classify parking lots as "Land Improvements" with a 15-year recovery period. At Year 15, the parking lot is "dead" on your balance sheet (fully depreciated), but it is almost certainly still in use.

The goal is financial cost recovery, not physical reality.

2. Mean Life (Reliability) ~ 15–20 Years

From an engineering standpoint, the Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) for asphalt without significant intervention is often around 15 to 20 years. This is the point where, statistically, the base layer and surface have degraded enough that half of the parking lots like this have experienced "failure" (potholes, structural cracking).

The goal is to identify a "design life" at which the parking lot naturally reaches the end of its first functional cycle, with satisfactory performance in terms of quality, safety, and regulatory compliance.

3. Service Life (Operations) ~ 25–35 Years

This is the longest period because it accounts for strategic maintenance. By performing regular maintenance like sealcoating (every 3-5 years) and a mid-life resurfacing or overlay (around Year 15-20), the actual replacement date can be pushed much further out.

The reality is that most organizations do not rip out a parking lot just because it’s 20 years old. They keep it in service until it is no longer safe or until the maintenance costs exceed a specified percentage of the cost of replacement.

The goal is to maximize the return on the initial investment, even if the cumulative cost exceeds the value of that investment.

What We Really Want is Remaining Useful Life (RUL)

In practice, we want to estimate “remaining useful life” to forecast future renewal and replacement (R&R) needs.

This is where the terminology gets messy. In practice, “useful life” (accounting) and “remaining useful life” (engineering/asset management) do not share the same conceptual foundation, even though the words look similar. And that’s why many people get tripped up.

RUL is a condition‑based estimate of how long the asset can continue to perform its intended function. It’s based on degradation, inspections, performance, and failure modes. RUL is used for maintenance, risk management, and operational planning, but has nothing to do with accounting or depreciation schedules.

Remaining Service Life Adds to the Confusion

Service Life and Remaining Service Life (RSL) are directly related—RSL is simply the unexpired portion of an asset’s total service life. They use the same operational perspective, just from different points in time. In contrast, Remaining Useful Life (RUL) is an engineering estimate based on asset condition and is conceptually distinct from RSL, as it is not tied to the originally expected service duration but to the current capability left.

• Service Life is the total period that an asset is expected to remain in service.

• Remaining Service Life (RSL) is the portion of that service life that has not yet elapsed.

The two terms differ only in where you are on the timeline, not in the conceptual basis.

However, useful life and remaining useful life (as previously discussed) are different conceptually.

A Formal Approach Is Needed for Communicating Asset Life

Useful life is a financial estimate; remaining useful life is a physical estimate; service life is an operational estimate. They answer different questions and should never be treated as interchangeable.

Situations with high complexity and uncertainty require formal communication approaches, and this one certainly does. It's also uncertain because most organizations don’t have “asset life” clearly defined and estimated.

Ultimately, estimating remaining useful life or a modified asset life within ranges and developing forecasts using Monte Carlo simulations is the most efficient and effective analytical approach.

The elements of the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram® are Frame, Illustrate, Noise reduction, Empathy, Structure, Synergy, and Ethics.

Communicating with the FINESSE Approach

The FINESSE Fishbone Diagram® is a structured approach designed to enhance effective communication, particularly in complex and uncertain situations, by focusing on seven cause-and-effect elements: Frame, Illustrate, Noise Reduction, Empathy, Structure, Synergy, and Ethics.

Frame

Define the problem in decision-maker language, not reliability jargon.

Frame the issue as: “We need a simple, repeatable way to connect statistical reliability (mean life) to how long assets remain useful, so our capital and maintenance plans are credible.” Providing the definitions is a fundamental aspect of framing.

Illustrate

Use visuals, examples, and simple ratios to make the abstract concrete.

A table is one of six essential visuals in the FINESSE approach. Tables are ideal for showing industry standards for ranges of useful life, remaining useful life and service life.

Noise Reduction

Strip away details that do not change the decision.

Avoid dragging executives into debates about distribution fitting, confidence bounds, or β used in Weibull calculations to the third decimal place. Keep the message focused on, “For planning purposes, mean life is roughly two-thirds of service life for most of our mechanical assets.”

Empathy

Acknowledge the pressures and constraints decision makers face.

Recognize that managers don’t have time for statistical arguments on one hand or operational short-cuts on the other. They want: “Can I trust this number?” and “What will happen if we’re wrong?” In most cases, they will “safe” asset life estimates (at least until they see the rolled-up budget requirements).

Structure

Organize the message so a busy leader can follow it in one pass.

Use a simple three-step process:

• Show a range of potential asset lives.

• Pick a number in between (either the average or the median)

• Be prepared to explain your judgment, if asked.

Most decision makers want a reasonable estimate, usually a synthesis of industry norms and organizational experience.

Synergy

Align technical positions (engineering, accounting, and O&M) with organizational priorities.

Most senior managers and board members will have strong alignment with one discipline. Others will not care about the useful life. Communicate how your conclusions tie to the organization's mission, vision, and values. This provides decision makers the room to compromise.

Ethics

Be transparent about limits and assumptions.

Acknowledge uncertainty, reiterate boundary conditions, and politically share data limitations. That honesty builds trust far more than a false sense of precision.

Need Help Refining Asset Life Communication?

Need help getting started? JD Solomon Inc. provides practical solutions to align asset useful life and strengthen your asset management program.

How to Communicate Facility and Infrastructure Master Plans

Communicating master plans requires connecting forecasts, projects, and priorities so people can follow them without feeling overwhelmed.

Facility and infrastructure master plans are strategic roadmaps that guide growth, compliance, and long‑term investment. At their core, master plans provide a comprehensive vision for facilities and infrastructure development over a defined horizon, often 10–20 years. Just as important, master plans provide the foundation for developing shorter-term capital programs (normally over 5 to 7 years).

Master plans consider organizational goals, mission needs, workforce projections, facility conditions, and complex planning issues such as physical security, cybersecurity, emerging regulations, sustainability, and logistics.

A master plan is both a strategic document and a communication tool. Its success depends on how well it is understood by decision makers and stakeholders.

A Recent Example

I recently facilitated the board of directors' annual retreat for Beaufort-Jasper Water and Sewer Authority. This year, the focus was on the new master plan and the revenues required for ratemaking. As usual, an infrastructure-oriented consultant assisted with the master plan, and a financial consultant focused on ratemaking.

A few of the big takeaways from the retreat are:

1. The master plan and the revenue model are directly related – If for no other reason, the rate of customer growth and demand needs to be similar, if not the same.

   
   

2. Integrate communication for both purposes. Create a video for the master plan projects to serve as a tangible product justifying increased rates to customers. The video will also show stakeholders that the organization’s vision and values are being delivered.

   
   

3. Developing the list of capital projects – Prioritizing is tricky when capital budgets are limited. This effort should have a separate communication and facilitation strategy from the overall master plan.

Components of a Master Plan

A strong master plan typically includes:

• Vision and Goals: A broad statement of desired outcomes, supported by measurable objectives.

• Assessment of Current Infrastructure: Evaluating existing conditions, capacity, and deficiencies.

• Demand Forecasts: Projections of future needs (such as water or electricity use) based on data and prediction models.

• Project List: Prioritized initiatives, often capitalized for accounting purposes.

• Geographic Distribution: How projects align with sub‑regions or political boundaries.

• Stakeholder Input: Perspectives from boards, staff, and external partners.

Facility master plans also emphasize budget requirements, phasing, and implementation strategies. This emphasis underscores that investments are intentional and aligned with long‑term goals.

Demand Forecasts: Turning Data into Dialogue

Forecasting is one of the most debated aspects of master planning. Whether for water, sewer, transportation, or energy, forecasts rest on assumptions about future supply and demand. Facilitators of master plans should expect extended discussions about methodologies, schedules, and results.

Three common approaches help communicate forecasts:

Comparisons

Contrasting past and present trends, or comparing models across sectors such as economic development, water, and transportation.

Parcel‑based analysis

Using zoning maps and permit histories helps to project growth parcel by parcel. This method is the most detailed and accurate, but it is also the most complex to explain.

“Bend of the knee” scenarios

Plotting high, medium, and low forecasts over time. By examining slopes (the rates of increase or decrease) and inflection points (where a trend changes direction), audiences can visualize acceleration or deceleration in demand.

The challenge is not producing the numbers. Success depends on communicating the numbers in ways that build trust. Best practice is to frame forecasts as narratives, supported by visuals, that show both continuity and uncertainty.

Best‑in‑class infrastructure planning requires transparency in assumptions and clarity in communication to avoid overspending and missed opportunities.

Capital Projects: Sources and Sensitivities

Projects in master plans come from many sources. These may include boards of directors, senior administrators, existing capital plans, third-party partnerships, compliance requirements, emergencies, and customer complaints. Each source carries its own sensitivities.

Plan developers must recognize participants may have vested positions. The goal is not to eliminate divisions, but to foster understanding and leave room for negotiation. This calls for nuance and sequencing. Techniques include introducing contentious topics gradually, framing them in accessible language, and sequencing discussions to build consensus.

1 Geographic Distribution and Political Sub-Divisions

Master plans are rarely uniform across a service area. The service area may refer to geographic regions or business units, such as water treatment versus wastewater treatment, or power generation versus power distribution.

Decision makers want clarity on how many projects fall within each sub‑region or political boundary.

2 Prioritization

Prioritization of projects and spending is usually contentious. These are three sources.

Dependencies

Many capital projects have multiple phases. A central question is whether a later phase of a current project should be included in new prioritization efforts.

If not, the additional phases and their capital budgets should be removed from the prioritization process and earmarked for future implementation.

If those projects are included, then facilitation measures should be used to minimize participants from biasing the subsequent phases. After all, if the subsequent phases are in the new prioritization efforts, then someone is indicating that those phases must be fairly considered on their own merits.

Strategic Initiatives

Strategic initiatives often include things like emerging technologies, green energy, fairness or diversity, security (physical or cyber), and safety. These initiatives are not often seen by the operation as being essential for the current mission and often fall into the mental category of “nice to have.” Initiatives also have a smaller value than most capital projects and are mentally forced into a category, “if any money is left over.” A central question is whether a strategic initiative should be part of new prioritization efforts.

If not, the strategic initiatives and their capital budgets should be removed from the prioritization process and earmarked for future implementation.

If those projects are included, facilitation measures should minimize the bias toward day-to-day needs over strategic initiatives. Including strategic initiatives in every project's scoring may also skew prioritization efforts.

Prioritization methodology

Many decision makers distrust prioritized project lists for two reasons: it's the staff's list, not theirs, and the prioritization tools are a "black box."

Ranking projects using techniques such as multicriteria analysis or forced ranking is normal practice. The issue is who gets to participate, including how far down in the management structure that staff participate, how does the board of directors get to participate, and what is the role of external stakeholders.

From a communication perspective, the best approach is to use multiple prioritization methods and compare results. Showing how different techniques produce similar or divergent rankings builds credibility. It also demonstrates transparency.

Stakeholder Input: From Division to Legitimacy

Stakeholder input is an opportunity for communication, not just a box to check. Boards, staff, and external partners bring perspectives that can enrich the master plan. The plan developers’ role is to surface these perspectives without letting them derail the process.

Good practices include:

• Framing input as part of the broader narrative.

• Illustrating how feedback influences priorities.

• Engaging stakeholders in dialogue rather than one‑way presentations.

• Simplifying complex feedback into actionable themes.

By applying these principles, master plan facilitators can transform stakeholder engagement from a source of division into a source of legitimacy.

Effectively Communicating Master Plans

Master plans succeed when the story is clear, not when the binder is thick. The communicator’s job is to connect forecasts, projects, and priorities so people can follow them without feeling overwhelmed. Transparency in assumptions and sequencing builds the trust that technical detail alone never will.

The goal is shared understanding, not persuasion. When decision makers see how the pieces fit together, they gain confidence in the path forward. With that confidence, the master plan becomes a practical roadmap rather than another planning exercise.

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JD Solomon Inc. provides solutions for program development, asset management, and facilitation at the nexus of facilities, infrastructure, and the environment. Visit our Program Development and Facilitation pages for more information related to master plans.

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JD Solomon writes and consults on decision-making, reliability, risk, and communication for leaders and technical professionals. His work connects technical disciplines with human understanding to help people make better decisions and build stronger systems. Learn more at www.jdsolomonsolutions.com and www.communicatingwithfinesse.com.