Dear PM Advisor,
My team has a SharePoint site where I post all the documents relevant to the project. But I still get Team Members complaining that I never sent them the document they need to make their decision. Or they missed something that was clearly on the status report. What can I do?
I told you so in Morristown, NJ
Dear I told you so,
Life was so easy when we typed up a status report and hand delivered it to our team members. We could look them in the eye and say, "I put it on your chair yesterday."
But that was before all these new technological ways of avoiding doing our jobs came along. First there were e-mails that could be deleted unread, now there is a SharePoint site that need never be opened.
There is a trend that moves us away from 'Push' communications to 'Pull.' We used to push the communications onto people. We told them the information they needed to know or we wrote it down and handed it to them. Now we update the SharePoint site and expect our Team Members to check it regularly.
But people haven't become more proactive in the meantime. We are all still busy and won't go out of our way to find extra work to do.
So push the communication onto them. Send them an e-mail with the link in big letters for them to click on to get the updates. And follow up on them. I don't know how they do it but Cadence knows whether or not I have downloaded the updated files they send to me because they will nag me if I haven't done it.
Don't hide behind technology. It is still your job to make sure everyone reads what they need to. If you've seen the communication model, I'll write a post about this soon, the key point is that the person communicating, you, must ensure that the communication is received as intended.
Good luck,
PM Advisor.
Send me your questions at bfieggen@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment