Joel Liu's Library tagged communication → View Popular

23 Aug 09

June 21, 2004
(Computerworld)
Early in my career, when I worked as an engineer, my boss had a process by which the engineering team was expected to report project status. He insisted that we use the following steps, in the specified order:

1. Punch line: The facts; no adjectives, adverbs or modifiers. "Milestone 4 wasn't hit on time, and we didn't start Task 8 as planned." Or, "Received charter approval as planned."

2. Current status: How the punch-line statement affects the project. "Because of the missed milestone, the critical path has been delayed five days."

3. Next steps: The solution, if any. "I will be able to make up three days during the next two weeks but will still be behind by two days."

4. Explanation: The reason behind the punch line. "Two of the five days' delay is due to late discovery of a hardware interface problem, and the remaining three days' delay is due to being called to help the customer support staff for a production problem."
At first, reporting this way wasn't a comfortable thing to do. It forced us to get to the point quickly and not resort to obfuscation.
1 more annotations...
- For many project team members, starting with the punch line can be disconcerting, but we have found that once they become accustomed to it, they truly enjoy the clarity of the message and the time saved in getting the point across.
  
  Try it, you'll like it.

12 Aug 09

Instead of going to general networking events, I prefer to go to conferences and talks where the presentations naturally give us topics of conversation. I'm also comfortable sharing what I'm learning online. Many of my conversations now start with someone else telling me that they've read my blog, and the conversation goes straight to interests we both have.

29 Mar 08

17 Apr 07

02 Mar 06

Active Listening - Communication is a two-way street, so it is important
that you listen carefully to your team mates when they are speaking. Don't tune
speakers out or get caught in the trap of planning ahead to what you want to say
next. You may miss an important detail, and in the worst case, you repeat
the detail you missed because you were not listening.

"And there's a lot more issues to be solved than RSS… Ultimately the whole
problem of notification,
deep user interface problem, you know, having all these things understand your
context and their priority

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