Our team struggles with more basic communication. And yet when Sharepoint became available in our organization, our team jumped at getting on board. The group think was that this would solve a lot of problems by giving us a tool which was communication based.

Reality was that the same bad habits were then applied to the new tool just like the old tools. And soon the new tool was just as cumbersome and ineffecient as the old ones.

Here is a small list of some of the bad habits or misconceptions that beleaguer our leadership:

• Email is a good document repository
• An Inbox with 4000 messages is good for one’s productivity
• You can never have enough sub-folders
• Spend all your time reacting. Then you don’t have to waste time planning…

I wish I could say that these habits have been resolved and that all of our tools are benefitting our team because we have worked on producing good habits. But that is not case. I try myself to lead by example and to work with people one on one when I see some of these poor habits. I find that most times people are more than happy to take advice in this area - they usually soak it up. And with great resources out there like David’s book (GTD) and sites like this, I find that a small bit of my time is enough to get people started. Then I just point them in the right direction.

Sharepoint is indeed the cure for something (much like the mould in the sink) but not for communication. I am a project manager by trade and have spent a professional lifetime finding my way around the latest techno-nonsense that will finally, finally give us a grip on our project status and spending.

The latest one is a beast called “Clarity” which is so complex to administer that we have actually had to take on extra staff so that the projects required to use it to do not founder under the weight of its inputs. I am not joking or exaggerating, you cannot even get a printed report out of the thing.

In contrast I have seen project work most effectively administered by a tiny Lotus app that wanted you to upload a standard wordprocessed report (ie the same one you would submit on paper anyway) and give a traffic light (Red Amber Green) to your status. If you wanted the project to get managment attention you put in a Red or Amber and they automatically put you on the agenda of the next management meeting.

I have struggled to use complex support applications from Tivoli to Applix to whadever. I did get effective support from an ancient mainframe mail system that the gurus from engineering monitored faithfully.

The best tools are the simple ones supported by good behaviours. The worst ones are the complex ones whose asymmetric demands compared to value delivered create avoidance and even downright fraud.

When we started our two-person graphic and web business, we bought into using several web-based systems for handling client communications and managing projects. We were told everyone was doing it these days: electronic CRM and job trackers were essential, said our local business support group.

After just a couple of months when we’d climbed the initial learning curve, we quickly tired of the added overhead in costs and time that the supposedly wonderful new tools had introduced. I now think that dropping the systems everyone else had told us were essential was the best business decision we’ve made this year. We’re so much more productive on paper, and we’ve got to know our clients as more than numbers in a list.

We’re now using a whiteboard for our project management, and simple paper-based calendars for client liaison and records. I think a lot of SMEs could benefit from this philosophy — by avoiding the pressure to use systems that were designed for larger companies, they might prevent the usual headaches and admin that such software and tools introduce into their working weeks.

I work with a design organization spread across three continents. We use email (doesn’t work that well), PowerPoint and Flash to communicate design concepts (like taking a whole day to say “hello”), Lotus Notes applications (good for recording forever, bad for anything in the same decade you’re inhabiting), and various custom software tools that are always more trouble than they’re worth. We’ve had success with two things: the Boeing 777 (very effective, but very time consuming and expensive in several senses) and just recently a high-definition videoconferencing system that consumes a frightening amount of bandwidth, but really works. In fact, it’s astonishing how well it works. Unfortunately it’s also astonishing how much it costs.

What works great for us is goto meeting. I work in a government organization, and am working on a project that consists of different government portions plus industry. We use gotomeeting for documentation reviews and project status meetings. This is really useful in allowing four to six different locations to interact without the need for travel. In that respect, it saves a lot of time and money. But its ease of use can also be a drawback, which results in more meetings than are really necessary. So, you take the good with the bad. In the end, I would rather sit at my desk through twice as many meetings than traveling each week.

In our organization, we were using a custom project/task tracking tool, which was required for all employees to use. The end product was to generate metrics across the organization for upper management use. This became a big issue, because the product was not very reliable or useable, the data fields required were too cumbersome to make it useful for everyday use. So you ended up updating status twice, once to your own system and once to the organizations system. To compound matters, there was a lot of pressure from management to ensure it was update weekly, and that nothing was overdue. Suffice it to say, the whole goal from the workers perspective was to just meet the requirements and leave the tasks as general as possible, which I imagine didn’t generate meaningful metrics either. I think management finally caught on and decided to scrap the system. Good thing for now, except the reason the old system was scrapped was so that the managers and project managers could take extensive MS Project training for the next version of metric generating system. We may be wishing for the old system in the end.

Running a large news organization in the midst of a rapidly changing media, finance and tech ecology in the late 1990s, it struck me that the only way for the journalists to remain relevant was to speed up their ability to collaborate to absolute real-time, and across disciplines. The culture has caught up with us, and I see Twitter being used in just such a way as I applied mIRC, but in an open source way. More about that in this link here.

http://knackeredhack.com/2007/12/19/66-characters-in-search-of-a-story/

My main advice for managers would be to understand in detail the nature of the problem to be resolved, and to observe with great care the individual interactions. Collaboration needs a light touch from the manager to allow a particular type of personality to emerge that can hold a team together. That person won't necessarily be someone normally found in a supervisory function and may be as important as the functionality of the tools chosen.

A homely example: I still have a fax number on my business card. Although I sometimes send a fax (very rare), I never receive one. I still have a street address on my business card. I still get FedEx envelopes with manually signed letters, I rarely send one. I still have an email address on my business card. Although I get relatively little spam, I read 10% of what I get and answer maybe half of that. I still have an office phone on my business card. No more than 10% of calls I make or receive are live—it’s done through voice mail. For almost every meeting there’s a call-in number even if every one is actually in the office within a three-minute walk/elevator ride. If there’s an all-hands meeting in a department, no one will ask a question, but will have whispered conversations afterwards about what wasn’t said.

The worst communication tool I ever used at work was the Blackberry. Don’t get me wrong, it has its place. But as a tool to exchange ideas anything more complex than where to meet for lunch it is too bandwidth starved. Trying to make decisions based on people thumb typing ideas based on descriptions of attached powerpoint decks summarizing three levels of committee meetings based on other powerpoints … . Well, you get the idea.

In large organizational settings, however, it is the near immortality of communication channels and their overlapping and underlapping purposes and intended audiences that gets me. If the man with two watches can never be sure what time it is, the big business with legacy channels can never be sure what planet it’s on. The process energy hump to get any channel set up guarantees that it will be kept “just in case” even though content becomes stale. A bot could roam these systems taking down the zombie channels and although no one would notice, no one would ever want to say, “no, we don’t need it anymore.”

Then there are the Harold Pinter plays based on Kafka reinterpreted as Dilbert dates Alice in Wonderland that you fall into with the “Enterprise Knowledge Management Enablement Empire” to guarantee that only ASCII characters guaranteed not to crash the mainframe screen scraper systems and other high-risk issues are locked down through controls on the creation, versioning, branding, stylesheets and access privileges for corporate systems to assure a uniform standard, based on the lowest possible denominator. As Admiral Hooper said “ships are safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.”

One consequence of lockdown is that the Google powered intranet search engine is useless. Think about it. If users can link only with approval, most pages end up linking within only a very narrow domain.

The best communications tool I ever used at work was the 15-minutes reserved each day for my boss and our two assistants to have a stand-up meeting to huddle. Some days it ran over, many days it was a quick 1-minute “nothing to bring up..