adoption curve dot net

The middle of a crisis is probably the last time you’re going to think of using blogs as a way of communicating – but there’s an interesting article on Fast Company that might be worth reading and mentally filing about they could be used in the midst of a PR crisis.

The standard approach to responding to a crisis is to hunker down behind closed doors. Blogs can help companies remain accessible.

But rather than waiting for a crisis to hit, a more intelligent approach would be to use of blogs to communicate about day-to-day service issues – after which they would become the natural response to a crisis situation.

A good example of this is the UK-based ISP PlusNet – they have a blog and RSS feed that they use to update customers on what’s going on with their network and service. Not only does it allow them to communicate proactively about what’s going to happen – maintenance downtime, for example – but also allows them a way of keeping customers informed about major problems as and when they arise.

And of course, this isn’t just restricted to the public face of the company. If you’re running a service function within an organisation – and if you’re not serving someone, perhaps you need to question whether you’ve got your priorities straight! – why not use an internal blog to keep your internal customers in the picture? Not only are you easing the information flows within your organisation, over time you’ll also build a much higher profile within the business – particularly important if you want to promote your function as one that adds value rather than costs.

It boils down to a maxim given to me by an older, wiser colleague early on in my project management career – “a good project is one with no surprises”. Keep people informed, and you can get away with much more!

If you use Prince2 as your in-house methodology – or you’re just interested in methodologies generally – you may also be interested in a new user group that has just been launched.

The Prince2 Community Forum (P2UG) has been set up online “to enable Prince2 users to interact with each other, share information and gain a better insight into the implementation of Prince2 in different industry sectors”.

There’s also a directory of service providers, which is free to list in.

The forum can be found at www.p2ug.com

There’s an interesting post about the importance of visual speech information over at Beyond Bullets, which got me thinking about how important this can be in a project situation.

visual speech information (i.e. seeing the speaker’s face) facilitates the processing of auditory speech

This is something that’s particularly important in the context of webcams and video-conferencing – the fact that there’s a slight lag between the image and the sound makes following the speech just that bit more difficult.

Which is something to bear in mind if video-conferencing is a big part of your communications arsenal in the course of a project – while it’s often the only practical way to communicate with a dispersed team (and is a considerable improvement on audio conferences in my experience) it’s still a crippled medium compared with the alternative of sitting around a table.

One of the things I’ve always tried to do in setting up projects is to make sure that everyone meets everyone else physically at least once during the project lifecycle, and preferably at the start when the relationships are being established. It’s relatively intangible, but the memory of knowing what a person looks like and how they act can bring an added depth to video or audio conferences, and help lessen the chances of misunderstandings as a result of unseen body language.

Equally, if you’re mid-way through a project and there are real communication problems, consider whether it’s worth bringing everyone together physically – particularly if you’re trying to resolve disagreements. It’s all-too-easy to hold a position dogmatically if you’re only communicating by email – so sitting around a table and discussing the situation with the benefit of full body language can sometimes help to break an impasse.