“Communication is seldom noticed, until it fails” – Jonathan Pearson
The quote above is true in so many different facets in life…however, lets talk about communication in the context of the modern organization. “Effective Communication” – with our customers, shareholders, business partners, vendors, and employees – is the LIFEBLOOD of any organization. It is how strategies, directives, issues, problems, and solutions are taken care of. “Effective Communication” encompasses many different qualitative factors: tenor, intent, emotion, the words we choose, how those words are combined, etc. You can go to any public relations professional and get a complete read out on the how, why, where, when, etc., of “Effective Communication”
But lets take a step back and remember the unique position you are in as technologist supporting your organization. While others worry about content and the very good and valid methods and targeted results for communication…Your first job is to make sure that the messages get delivered to where they need to go when they need to get there. Remember, communication takes two sides, a sender and a receiver. A beautifully crafted email only goes as far as the recipients ability to get the message.
What happens when communication fails? Think about the “noise” you hear on the news and on the message boards when there is an Internet goes down and people cant get to the websites an email. Ever been at a company where there has been a telecom outage? Complete chaos ensues (thankfully minimized by everyone having a cell phone nowadays). Ever had a chance to read the scathing comments about MicroSoft when there is the slightest blip in Office365 service?
Without delivery of communication, things can get ugly very quickly. Its a huge risk for any organization, and you and your team better get your hands wrapped around delivery risk real quick. Most employees take email and voice comms for granted, and even good technologists that do the day-to-day work on your infrastructure rarely step out of the weeds to visualize potential problems and challenges in the interrelated technology and vendor infrastructure that can creep up and create message delivery problems.
Here is a few crucial steps you need to take to manage communication risk:
Make it a collaborative team effort: Bring in a cross functional team of technologists from your IT team, vendors, and company employees that are “drivers” for communication (People like marketing, PR, key executive assistants, etc.) and have them participate in process of understanding and managing risk.
Know your communication mediums: “Mediums” are the means in which your organization chooses to communicate with everyone. Email and voice communications are the most obvious mediums for message delivery, but think about all the other ways in which your organizations communicates internally and externally. Is VideoTeleconferencing used? How are presentations delivered? How does marketing deliver messages? Are messages delivered to desktops directly? Are we using screen savers to communicate messages? Text messages? Catalog and track each of these and the vendors and internal parties responsible for these mediums.
Know you communication channels: “Channels” are the vectors that the messages are delivered. Is this WAN, LAN, Wireless? Catalog and track each of these and understand and catalog the components necessary to make the communication happen.
Know and understand your communication risk points: Once you know your mediums and you channels, have the team do walk through of each of your mediums and channels and do your best to identify failure points for these channels and mediums. Make sure you have an understanding of your single point of failures (technical and/or vendor). Ask the “what if” questions on each communication vector. Make the investment of time to understand and address the risks. Bring in experts to assist your team if they don’t know. At the end of the day, you should have a good list of items that need to be worked on.
Develop and execute plan to manage communication risks: At the end of this exercise, you should have a plan of attack on how to make sure the communication doesn’t stop and the company can keep working and communicating. Let your project managers take over and report on result back to the core team.
Repeat once a year or so. Remember, an ounce of prevention can go a long way to save you and your team some real pain.
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