Group chats - where chaos runs supreme
I was thinking...having 15+ different chats in one Communication tool, before opening the other 2 which are to be watched in case a customer would like to have a word, can be defined as : everyday "manageable" Chaos?
Working for a corporation implies good communication and ability to focus and manage multiple tasks and\or projects in a short amount of time. Now this is something which I fully agree, nevertheless when the amount of information sources multiplies almost exponentially by the year (especially in this beautiful year 2020, with working from home) you got to ask yourself the question, when does communication becomes obstructed by ironically too much ways of communicating?
Let's check a typical day, arriving to work and opening your laptop. You might start your email client to check if you have to add something to your to do list before starting Skype. Now, I started with one of the "Legacy" tools, which you could still easily handle because it was flexible enough to offer you customization like offline mode, blacklist someone, set custom state etc . Now if you have some followers you might get in contact as soon as you set yourself online, but as previously mentioned you could work around that.
After Skype, you probably have another Tool, which integrates collaboration at it's core. You can make different interest groups, teams, configure group chats and so much more. Some examples of such excellent collaboration tools are Microsoft Teams, Slack, Circuit etc. And now it's when things become interesting. On paper that looks fantastic, you are connected to all and all can connect to you. The tools are there to facilitate your everyday communication, data gathering and collaboration; how does the practice look like?
Talking from my personal experience, the practice contradicts the perfection on paper. The problem is very similar with social media and the information flow which is pumped every day. With the new tools of collaboration, you begin to lack the filters which you could set in the past. Everyone is available via chat, right? In the end, what a chat can do except solving a problem? This benefit is also emphasized in DevOps, where Chatops allows employees to solve problem more quickly, directly and in small focused collaboration circles.
All this can be true IF you have the prioritization already there, as it is in case of ticketing and monitoring systems. The problem is that in those cases, you are not agile. You need to see the ticket, take it into work, check if it correctly assigned to you and solve or assigned it further to the next team where the entire chain repeats itself.
Now as chats are a communication platform, the decision making is taken by the employee based on his own personal know how and feeling. No clear structures just agility... Bringing to each of us an extra stress factor. You might be a person who is able to filter chats more easily than me but I have my doubts. In a corporation is impossible to know who is writing, what role does he have and correctly assign the urgency of the chat, without a checking it. What does this mean? Wasted time which is no longer imputed to a Tool but to you. You are no longer productive and no longer efficient if you (and this happens frequently) are no longer able to have the certainty of your decision. Which brings the next factor into the equation: Stress.
When you are not sure that your decision was the right one, a part of you remains doubting. Compared with a monitoring system, when you had a Prio1 ticket, you knew it. Even if it wasn't correctly assigned, the prioritization will continue with the next team, as they also receive a prio1 problem from you.
The big question is now: what is more efficient? The Trendy way of answering this question is of course Agile. The practical way is depends<. Agile can be a blessing for small teams with a few clear goals set. If you are now shifting that discussion to big enterprises, this is extremely hard to realize from a financial perspective. Service Providers are offering a broader pallet of services with very little dedicated teams. Translating this concept to our Group Chat Topic, that means in every given day an employee needs to collaborate with several teams for several projects and most probably from different continents. This is not feasible to be taken into consideration especially on the long run.
A typical day should be about solving problems and bringing a plus to your company or our society not organizing a complex communication Tool/Environment while trying for figure out how your day will go . Trust me, your points written in the morning to be done, will land on the tomorrow list, which will land on the next one. If you are OK with being planed by your organizational collaboration tool, then this might work. If you like your day more structured, then maybe opening your internal collaboration tool is not the best way to start it ;)
Until next time, TFG