360°IT Blog

An interesting article in a recent edition of the ShortList magazine asked: "Is your email killing you?" With the rise of smartphones like Blackberrys and iPhones, email overload is a very real and growing problem for many office workers. But it's more than a mere annoyance. The article notes: "Increased emailing can lead to feelings of depression, anxiety... even alienation and detachment."

The piece does a pretty good job at giving pointers to how you can protect yourself - only check once an hour or once a day your email, set up rules for less important mails, etc. However, these approaches ignore the more fundamental issue: we are not using the proper communication channels at work.

Instead of trying to patch the problem, let's look at the root cause. First, action leads to reaction. In other words, every email you send out will most likely generate one or more responses, which in turn will lead to more responses. So what if you can avoid sending emails at all?

Let's focus on a very specific example - IT project teams. Communication with all stakeholders and team members is vitally important in IT projects. Think about the communication required between business and IT, among developers, between developers and project managers (and so on). How does this usually take place? Via mass emails with half the organisation on the CC list (everyone needs to cover their arse, after all). The required 'reply all' to those emails results in a never-ending back-and-forth, with no escape possible.

How do you write project documentation? One person starts with a Word document and sends it around. People amend it using the 'track changes' functionality of Word, send their version back and soon tons of different versions need to be manually synchronised and followed up. If you're lucky, you might use something like SharePoint, but even that is more of a patch than a solution (we all know the horrors of SharePoint, right?).

Here a few simple pointers that might make life much easier for those involved in a project:

• Blog: instead of mass-mailing everyone with status updates, warnings about downtime, details of project progress, etc, why not just have an internal company blog? You avoid flooding people's mailboxes, you avoid having email discussions (discussions are captured as comments on the blog), everything is available online (giving you transparency) and you eliminate the problem of forgetting to include someone in the CC list.

• Instant messaging/micro-blog: depending on the culture in your organisation, an instant messaging or micro-blogging tool is a pretty good way to encourage 'low-disruption' communication. While face-to-face interactions are generally regarded as 'better' communication, nothing is more annoying than having someone continually popping up by your desk.

• Wiki: all the project documentation and supplementary materials like meeting notes, project calendar, etc should be stored in a system that is publicly accessible in your organisation and easy to use in collaboration with as many people as necessary.

Obviously, just having the tools won't make it happen, which is where many IT departments go wrong. When introducing this stuff, you also need to focus on the cultural and human impact of the change. You need to find ways these tools can fit into the daily workflow of those involved, instead of forcing a totally new process on people without consulting them. Because the worst thing that can happen (and often does) is that you invest a lot of money in state-of-the-art project collaboration tools only to find nobody uses them.

Lee Provoost works at the London-based social business consultancy Headshift on enterprise social software and technology strategy.

Tags: project management, collaboration, enterprise 2.0, web 2.0, blogs, wikis, micro-blogs,
project collaboration tools, social media

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