Communication as a Service

My title is a little “tongue in cheek” but I want say a few words about how we communicate with our clients. A good friend of mine once told me that in the IT world there are 3 kinds of news. Good News, Bad News and No News and you have to let your clients know all 3! It really is amazing how much your clients will appreciate this correspondence. We recently had an issue where the lack of good communication put us in a bad place with one of our clients. We were able to salvage the relationship by reporting what and how things were going and including some milestones for completion. I know that we were already doing these things internally but we failed to include the client. We made a conscious effort to communicate all of the 3 News’s!

One other process we took from our Microsoft experiences is after each meeting we provide a simple synopsis, highlighting what was covered and identify any action items to be accomplished as well as the priority. Each person that was involved in the meeting receives this email and is asked for clarification and input. This goes a long way in alleviating misunderstandings and finger pointing! The feedback from my clients is that they love it! This simple task shows competency and professionalism as well as fosters a more effective work experience.

How do you eat an Elephant?

Things are changing so fast in our business that it is getting very hard to keep up. New Technology, New Service Offerings, New Tools and New economic challenges! How do you keep all of these things straight as well as manage them? Really, how do you do it? The answer (for me anyway) is you can’t. Not all at the same time. One of my programmers showed me something called a Recursion Function. The concept is that you write a function that calls itself inside of itself. The idea is to take a complex problem and reduce it down to a simpler problem. Solve it one step at a time inside itself and then move on to the next. What a concept!

The problem for me is that I get so caught up in trying to do it all right now that I end up spinning my wheels! That is when the frustration and stress comes in to play and the problems compound. Take a step back, break it down, solve it one step at a time and get help when you need it. (Insert plug for HTG here) Having the responsibility to do everything doesn’t mean we have the ability. So for what it is worth if you are feeling overwhelmed you‘re not alone! So to answer the question in the title, just cut that steak into smaller bites, add plenty of ketchup and invite some folks for dinner!! Enjoy.