E-mail. It’s a wonderful technology and we all have a lot to thank it for.
E-mail. It’s a nightmare. Too much spam. Too much irrelevant crud. We should all be cursing the day e-mail was invented.
Strangely I suspect most of you would agree wholeheartedly with both of these statements. I know I do.
So which is it; angel or demon? Well, both. And neither. When it comes to e-mail and projects though it is too often the demon and too seldom the angel.
I’ve noticed on many occasions that projects can be killed, or at least severely wounded, by e-mail. Things progress something like this.
E-mail is used to communicate among the various team members. Person A asks person B for some information. Person B is slow to respond, so person A e-mails them again but this time CC’s in their own boss and person B’s boss. Now, neither boss has the solution to the problem or the information A wants from B. The intention is obviously to prod B into action by making the bosses aware of the request. The problem is, now three people are receiving the e-mail instead of just one.
The bosses have to read the e-mail, just in case it’s important (after all, they don’t want to be the cause of delays, nor do they want to be overlooking important decisions). Sure, it only takes a few seconds to open the e-mail and scan it, but that’s a few valuable seconds that could be used productively instead of filtering irrelevant e-mail.
Person B responds to A asking for clarification. Of course B uses Reply All because they want the bosses to know that it’s not their fault there’s a delay. More CC-mail.
On any substantial sized project this ridiculous CC-mail game leads to a huge amount of CC-mail in the system.
CC-mail is like cholesterol, it clogs up the project communication arteries making it harder to keep useful information flowing around the system. I’ve seen e-mails exchanged, ostensibly between two engineers, that have ten or more people CC’d in to the conversation. None of those people are directly relevant to the exchange they are CC’d in purely as a defensive measure, ‘sure, I told you this was a problem in that e-mail’.
It drives me nuts and some projects just grind to a halt as people either overlook important details in the maelstrom of irrelevant CC-mail or they spend so much time each day wading through e-mail that there’s no time for productive work.
So, what’s the solution?
One productive alternative is the project wiki. Carry out ‘public’ conversations on a project wiki. If you really feel you need to draw your bosses attention to an exchange then e-mail them once indicating the relevant wiki page/discussion. If they feel it’s important they can add themselves to a watch list on that page and receive notifications, or they can drop in when they have a few moments to see how things are progressing. The wiki provides a complete trail of the discussion (assuming you’re sensible and use a wiki that maintains a history of page edits), so if things do turn nasty each party has a good record of what happened —although if your project suffers from that level of mistrust it’s probably already in decline to oblivion.
Wikis also make the exchange public, meaning anyone can jump in and help solve the problems, and that’s what everyone really wants.
Keep e-mail for very specific communications and cut out CC-mail cholesterol from your project’s diet. Trust me, you’ll feel better for it.
