There has been some discussion, or at least some acknowledgment, in my organization recently regarding communication barriers. The organization is large and consists of a hierarchy of groups, subgroups and small project teams, each focused on a particular business aspect. My guess is that this organizational structure is fairly typical. Over the past several years, the organization has had to research, implement, support and maintain an increasing number of solutions for our clients, resulting in a steady rise in complexity and workload.
Communication in the organization, from my perspective, is generally localized and private, existing in some of the following forms:
- Closed door conversations
- Direct emails
- Phone calls
- Meetings
- Announcements
- Wiki (not necessarily a forum for conversational-style communication, but that use has been suggested)
The result is a lack of awareness between teams and groups of what other groups are doing. What problems are they working on? What do they do? How can I help? Who can help me? This lack of awareness can be remedied by an effective means of communicating and sharing of processes and information internally and externally to groups at each level. Essentially, there is a need for increased organizational transparency.
I think there are four critical aspects to an effective communication medium for increasing transparency in an organization:
- Easy to use – The barrier to adoption must be minimal.
- Accessible – Users need to be able to participate and/or contribute freely.
- Archivable – Communications need to be archived for reference.
- Searchable – Quickly pinpointing specific communication is essential for usability.
In my participation in the Sakai community and exposure to various other open source projects, if have found that the e-mail discussion list (or mailing list) is an effective, arguably essential, method of communication between project participants and fulfills each of these aspects. While this may be driven by the distributed nature of the projects, I feel that such a solution can similarly be applied to an organization like mine. The distribution, in this case, is not geographical but organizational. Since every organization already uses email for communication to some extent, it shouldn’t be too difficult to implement a communication solution using mailing lists.
As staff become increasingly overwhelmed with project related activities and requirements, overhead resulting from inefficient communication needs to be eliminated. This overhead currently exists in the form of meetings and duplication of effort. How often do we spend time in meetings where the majority of the communication is irrelevant or inapplicable? Couldn’t this time be better spent elsewhere? Are we trying to solve a problem that another group has already solved?
Creating topical discussion lists of reasonable granularity, possibly in addition to project and team based lists, allows for communication to flow across channels on which any interested party can listen and contribute to the discussion. Establishing the best practice that all relevant project and/or process related discussion be held in these lists and encouraging staff to subscribe to lists of particular interest helps to establish a dialogue across group or project boundaries. This dialogue of shared knowledge and interest can, at least in my experience, create a feeling of camaraderie, enhance the shared knowledge/understanding of participating individuals, and, hopefully, increase overall communication efficiency throughout the organization.
Tags: communication, discussion list, mailing list, organization, transparency
