Communication is not collaboration


Most would agree that good collaboration and teamwork are critical to delivering successful projects. What may not be so obvious is that collaboration involves a lot more than communicating through emails, instant messages, wikis, phone calls, document sharing, and status meetings. Below are 12 examples of how relying on these "communication tools" alone will actually hinder collaboration and effective teamwork.

  • Organization: Communication tools lack strucutre and many people spend all of their time and money trying to devise systems to compile and organize documents, emails, notes, etc. It's simply not possible to reliably organize information in these disbursed formats.
  • Version Control: Working with outdated information produces errors and requires expensive rework. Developing more elaborate document management solutions is simply a band-aid that covers a symptom of a bigger problem.
  • Certainty: Without a single source of project truth, nobody really knows what bit of key information they may be missing. What happens if an important email is missed? Chances are no one will know they are missing key information until it's too late.
  • Distribution: Making sure that every team member gets the information they need with communication tools is a manual effort that is very prone to human error. Inevitably, somebody gets left out of the loop and performance suffers.
  • Security: If your project has sensitive information then communication tools are risky. For example, who hasn't sent an email to the wrong person by mistake? What if a key member leaves the project and takes his inbox and notes with him?
  • Documentation: Notes are nice, but they run the risk of missing key points made during meetings and phone calls. Once these conversations are over, they are gone. The same goes for lost emails and instant messages. Even if nothing is lost, tying together all of the data into a useful archive is extremely difficult and time consuming.
  • Context: Messages in communication tools often lack context. For example, if a change is proposed to a requirement, one will not easily be able to access all the previous discussions concerning that requirement and related requirements.
  • Traceability: When data resides in communication tools, traceability is either impossible or extremely time consuming.
  • Accessibility: Communication tools create silos of data on individual computers and inboxes. The inability to access key data when it's needed creates unnecessary delays.
  • Reporting: Relying on communications tools to manage a project will lead to hours spent consolidating and structuring data in order to produce reports that will likely be out of date before they are even completed.
  • Automation: Generally speaking, communication tools are not capable of automating the routine tasks that are common in an IT project.
  • Process: Word documents, spreadsheets, emails, wikis, etc. were not built to work together in order to support a project management process. As a result, any attempt to implement and enforce a process will be met with breakdowns and human error.

The above examples illustrate that collaboration is as much about the sharing of data as it is communication. To improve data management, consider connecting all of your data together into a single repository that is structured, organized, and secure. Such a unified workspace will provide improved data accessibility, reporting and traceability. Most importantly, combining data management with communication will lead to better collaboration and an increased liklihood of project success.


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