How to Improve Communication
As some of my regulars may have noticed, my site is under a new domain! Can I get an AMEN to that?! Goodbye New Age Design and Hello Think Clay! Pretty soon you’ll see a new interface for this site as well.. Nick is already brewing up some fresh ideas for me!
But anyways.. let’s get to the post already!
Effective Communication is…
At Chosen we’ve had our struggles with communication the same as any other business can have. When you’re working with a diverse variety of professionals, each specializing in a unique trade or skill, there can be gaps in how to communicate an idea, functionality, or content. This post aims to identify the causes of some communication gaps as well as solutions for better communication.
The importance of communication
We all know how important communication is on some level, but what works for a small business might not work as that business grows. We experienced that with out own company.. we started out with a group of talented individuals all volunteering and working together whenever convenient. Often times it was a charity or a low cost project which lack of deadlines, strict deliverables, or consequences. We had good communication at the time simply using Google Docs to store information about various clients or meeting notes and we would collaborate and talk via email all the time.
After a short amount of time passed, we started getting more clients and more work than we could handle in our free time. We began to grow rapidly and our communication tactics, which worked beautifully before, crumbled to nothing. By chance, we ended up winning a license to a task manager called Active Collab from a contest hosted by Dev Snippets. Having a free corporate license and a need to use it, we installed our task manager and immediately started using it. This worked wonders for us, and for quite some time we didn’t have any communication issues.
The next challenge we hit was effective team communication in discussions. Our business was doing well with Active Collab, and actually has been since, but we recently discovered that we didn’t have a universal platform for IM. We have users all over the board for IM Clients with myself on Ubuntu, Joe and Ravi on Macs, Nick and Shane on Vista, and everyone else on XP. We all found it annoying that we had to have more than one IM client installed for team communication. Finally we came to an agreement and settled for using Skype as our mandatory IM platform. Skype has rapidly become the industry standard for communication in many businesses, and since it works so wonderfully across all platforms, we knew it would be a good fit. Since switching I’ve noticed a lot better communication among our teams.
The latest challenge we hit was with functional specs. Functional specs are always an issue in communication because everyone writes them differently and they have to be vague enough that everyone can read them and apply them to their portion of the project. For example, if you had a forum that was going to be tied into flash, front-end, php and MySQL each developer needs to know a portion of the spec. Therefore the project manager would have to know each one of those technologies well enough to write a specific functional spec that covered how they were each going to tie together. So what ends up happening is either the PM guesses or writes really vague.
One possible solution to this issue (one in which we’re looking into for ourselves) is in a technology called the Unified Model Language (UML). This technology uses illustrations and diagrams to explain anything from a simple sitemap to a complex OOP Application. In time we hope to find more effective ways to communicate and as we do, I’ll be sure to share them.. In the meantime, feel free to give some feedback.. what do you use to help improve communication in your workplace?
