Communicating Effectively - Wk 3

Communicating Effectively

Effective communication is important in work/professional life as well as personal life, but especially when working on collaborative efforts with others.  When you are involved in projects with other stakeholders, it is extremely important to communicate effectively and to work with them in the ways in which they comfortable in order to achieve desired results.  Projects almost always have over-arching goals and objectives that require the collaborative efforts of multiple stakeholders and therefore, as an ID or a PM, you need to learn to how to communicate effectively and work through issues with others in a productive way in order to meet the needs of the project.

My interpretation of each modality of, “the art of effective communication,” was that each of the deliveries communicated the same information but in different ways.  In the first modality, the message was clear and the needs were stated but because it was a document, it could easily be shuffled in with other documents and not given the important attention it obviously deserved.  The voicemail was more immediate; you could hear the concern in her voice and it was obvious that she took the time to call to give her message a personal touch in order to get your attention.  The face-to-face interaction is obviously the most immediate presentation because you would be receiving the information in real-time; which makes it almost impossible to ignore.  While this is obviously the most direct route and probably gets you results fastest; it is not always possible on projects when working with remote team members.  It is very important therefore, to keep in mind that a personal touch is often most effective and can get a team member’s attention (even remotely) through a phone call or a skype session, etc.  I will keep this in mind with future projects when I’m working with others who are unresponsive to email inquiries or requests. 

Learning from a project “Post-Mortem”

A project from my work experience that is worth examining is a project that was developed for specialists to follow a new evaluation process for applicants who wanted to achieve offered certificates.  The certificate applicants had to have a certain amount of experience within their respective fields.  The specialists then had to review that experience from the applicant’s resume or other submitted documentation and determine if they were qualified to enter the certificate program.  It was the purpose of the project to create documentation on what the experience requirements were for applicants to qualify them for the certificate programs and to post those resource documents on a SharePoint site for all of the specialists to access as they were reviewing applicant’s files.

What training/ID did well in the project was collecting input from the specialists on their understanding of the certificate programs and requirements as well as working closely with all stakeholders to ensure the resources could be supported by technology and that they were approved by leadership and regulatory advisors prior to implementation.  What training/ID did not do well in the project was that they failed to fully understand the role of the specialist when they were reviewing these applicants.  The specialists had a very high volume of applicant files to review, and thus, they needed to access the resource documents quickly.  Training/ID had placed all resource documents for all certificates in one PDF Portfolio on the SharePoint site; not thinking about how long it would take to sift through all of the different folders to find the right certificate PDF resource.  They thought they were being helpful in organizing the documents in a visual and creative way, but really, it ended up frustrating the specialists immensely as they had to search and wait for PDF’s to load in subfolders, within folders, within the portfolio.  Ultimately, this slowed down productivity for the specialists instead of making the process more consistent and clear.  Training/ID should have sat with the specialists and observed their work flow in order to better understand their needs and workflow prior to deciding on the format in which to house the final documents.