Click
the image above for the full-size flowchart. This is a draft attempt to document the best communication method/channel for various situations (face to face, email, phone, instant messenger/skype, or conference call). Please add your thoughts and suggestions to this post, and we’ll update the flow chart accordingly.
Great flowchart – I can see that a lot of thinking has gone in to it.
Some specific feedback:
I do not feel that Email is a suitable mechanism for collaboration. There are lots of On-line tools available – be they real-time such as Sametime, Adobe Connect and Netmeeting – or non-real-time such as WIKIs.
One of my jobs is as part of a global team who meet every week to collaborate on a project. Our collaboration is usually quite basic – a conference call and a slide deck. Sometimes we use a Sametime e-meeting but that isn’t the norm. With other teams I use Lotus Activities and WIKIs.
Email is purely used as a notification tool (along with Sametime for IM). Collaborating over Email has many disadvantages including:
– filling up peoples’ in-boxes, resulting in people missing stuff
– hard for new people to get up to speed on a project / communication as there isn’t a central repository of what has been discussed so far
Handy for certain other people…
🙂
The Do Nothing box could potentially be replaced with another question:
Is it private information?
Yes – Do Nothing (as before)
No – Write a Blog Post