Page 29 - Straight Talk On Project Management IV

Remote control: Lockdown your IT project email and communication habits

I hope I find you well. These are strange times aren't
they?

I've had many conversations this week with colleagues,
clients and IT Project acquaintances about where we
are as an industry.
It's a mixed picture.

Some IT projects are on hold as businesses hibernate
and try to weather the storm; others roll on in
anticipation of the day that this is all over and the
return on investment will be a better placed operation
ready to respond; a few have gone into overdrive as the
deliverables are needed now to accommodate
increased online activity and changing customer behaviours.

What is interesting, is how everyone I spoke to said roughly the same thing. They have taken this
time of change to think about how they go about their daily business, how they spend their time and
especially how they communicate within their projects.
To be honest, this matter of how we communicate has been rather forced upon us! Eight weeks ago,
"Who's Zooming Who?" was a question only Aretha Franklin had ever asked (just showing how
ahead of her time the Queen of Soul was) – now it's a common question as we find new ways to stay
connected.

It goes beyond the mechanics of how the meetings happen though. I have found that Zoom
meetings are shorter than equivalent face to face meetings in a cosy boardroom. Maybe it's the
delay that sometimes accompanies these calls; or the risk of a freshly showered family member
walking into shot behind me; maybe it's just that working from home means that if I get all my work
done by 3.30 pm I can hit the garden on a sunny afternoon. Whatever it is – I tend to try to be in and
out of virtual meetings and back to work a lot quicker, on average I believe I'm shaving about ten
minutes off every meeting that would usually have lasted half an hour.

I wrote about this once in an article titled "How to run an IT project meeting. The musky scent of
success, do we all need to be more Elon!?" but even I have to admit it is only this forced new way of
working that has focussed my mind to practice wholly what I preached here.
{https://www.stoneseed.co.uk/stoneseed-blog/how-to-run-an-it-project-meeting-the-musky-scent-
of-success-do-we-all-need-to-be-more-elon}

And this got me thinking. What other "sharp cuts" could we make now in preparation for when
things return to normal? What lessons can we learn that will make us leaner and more efficient
when restrictions are lifted and we can return to normal?

Email

Many of the industry colleagues and clients I spoke with told me that they have totally changed their
relationship to email. Emails can be anything from a quick confirmation to an escalation, from a
rebuke to a word of praise, from a 'heads up' to a scope change request.