Archive for the ‘Communication’ Category
Soporific speaker stereotypes
Some weeks ago I sat through yet another presentation that had me drifting into dreamland within minutes. To stay awake, I started to put together a list of stereotypical soporific speakers, much in the spirit of a couple of my earlier posts on project mismanagers and meeting time wasters. It was, I confess, the best time I’ve had at a bad presentation in a long time. Without further ado, here’s my list:
Pete Powerpoint: Peter’s presentations are a vehicle to showcase his undeniable virtuosity at Powerpoint. The content? Who cares. The slides are absolutely brilliant.
Freda Funny-font: Freda loves visual aids. Her problem is that she uses unreadable fonts.
Marty Mumbler: Martin has something useful to say, I’m sure. The only problem is I can’t figure out what it is. His presentations invariably consist of an inaudible issuance of intonations that even those in the front row cannot interpret.
Greta Garbled: Greta has mastered the art of the unfocused presentation. She manages to cram a lot of diverse – but not necessarily relevant – material into her talks. It’s quite a challenge to figure out what she’s going on about.
Barry Backside: Barry’s presentations can actually be quite good – if only I could get to see them. His problem is that he refuses to face his audience while speaking, often unwittingly covering his slides, or the whiteboard or whatever visual aid he’s using.
Umberto Unprepared: Umberto likes to wing it, but unfortunately ends up crashing every time. He never prepares for his presentations, and it invariably shows right from his starting stutter to his final fumble.
Oscar Overtime (Thomas Too-much): Oscar is in some ways the extreme opposite of Umberto – he prepares way more material than he has time to deliver. Consequently he ends up going over his allotted time. He’s mastered the art of ignoring frantic signals from meeting moderators and cues from annoyed audiences. He’s prepared all that wonderful material and he’s going to deliver it (all), come what may.
Mike Microphone-Muddler: You’ll hear about half of Mike’s presentation. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to predict which parts of his talk you’ll hear because he keeps drifting in and out of microphone range at random.
No doubt, there are many others I’ve missed in this short list of soporific speakers. I welcome further contributions to the list through your comments.
Many snappy returns
Some weeks ago I played table tennis , or ping-pong as North American residents know it, for the first time in many years. The occasion was brought about by a comprehensive power failure in the building I work in. The UPS held up for a half hour or so, giving our ops mob just enough time to notify users and shutdown servers gracefully. That done, all we could do was to wait for the guys at the power company to do their thing.
Deprive a bunch of IT folks of their computers and they’ll soon start inventing other means of entertainment. Sure enough, within minutes someone suggested improvised table tennis, to be played on the lunch room table with CD cases as racquets and printer toner cartons, lined up end-to-end, serving as a rather wide net. We played several rounds of single-point games, with the loser handing the CD case to the first person on the queue (by this time a large queue had formed since no one had anything better to do).
Whilst engaged in a particular long rally against a worthy opponent from helpdesk, it occurred to me that table tennis rallies are a bit like dealing with clients. Allow me to explain: the aim of the game – table tennis, not consulting (although some practitioners may consider the latter a game as well) – is to lob or smash or return the ball in any way to the other court as snappily as one’s ability permits.
“And what does this have to do with consultants dealing with clients?”, I hear you ask.
Well, consultants are generally engaged to provide a service in return for which they are paid, often by the hour or some multiple thereof. Given that consultants bill by time, it behooves them to respond to all client queries in a timely manner.
If you are a consultant, your clients should never be left wondering about when they might expect a response from you. If there’s any waiting to be done, be sure it’s you who is doing the waiting. Snappy, accurate responses to client queries are of paramount importance. As in the case of table tennis, the ball should as far as possible be in their court, not yours.
Effective project communication enhances IT/business alignment
The so-called gap between IT and business has led to a surfeit of articles on IT/business alignment in magazines targeted at technology decision makers. Should a CIO want to do something about the disharmony between her (or his) department’s efforts and those of the rest of the business, there are several consulting firms (big and small) who claim to be able to get the two sides singing in tune. Many solutions proposed by these folks focus on technology or processes – such as service oriented architecture or project management processes for example. No surprises there, I guess. But, although technology and process may indeed be a part of the solution, I believe they do not address the fundamental problem which is one of poor communication between the two sides.
About 50 years ago, CP Snow talked about the breakdown in communication between the sciences and the the humanities, in his influential lecture on The Two Cultures. Although Snow was referring to academia, thedivide between IT and the rest of the business can be seen as a part of the same rift. The divide has two aspects to it:
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Mutual misperception: Many business users see IT as the “folks who fix computers”. The view from the other side is just as one-dimensional, with technical people stereotyping accountants and sales professionals as bean counters and snake-oil salespersons. Clearly, there’s little hope for a genuine partnership between IT and the business while such misperceptions remain.
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Mutual incomprehension: In keeping with the geeky stereotype, IT people often speak in a jargon-and-TLA laden dialect when communicating with business folks. The other side’s guilty too, but less so – I’ve had a few situations where I’ve had to remind people of my ignorance of accounting arcana (sorry, what’s amortization Jack?).
Improving cross-departmental communication is a first step in bridging the schism between geeks and suits , which in turn is a prerequisite to closing the gap between IT and the business. To have the best chance of taking hold in the organisation, the improvement needs to occur at the grassroots level – i.e. at the level of individual interactions between the two sides. Technology-oriented business projects present excellent opportunities to improve cross-disciplinary communication because they involve frequent interactions between IT and other specialisations in the organisation. Building IT credibility within a business takes time, effort – and yes, technology and process too. But a good place to start is with building individual relationships across departments, through effective person-to-person communication on projects.
Eight to Late 