Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
from some other document. Designers are sometimes forced to shoehorn
detailed technical diagrams into slides, thereby reducing them to unread-
able “chartjunk.”
E-Mail
E-mail is ubiquitous. We have drawn attention to the fact that information
about a project is spread across many channels. E-mail is one of the most-
used channels. The information in e-mails can be called semi-formal. It
consists of notifications, tactical issue handling, and technical discussions.
Attachments may be formal documents or forms. An e-mail thread is like
a call-response unit in music, although it may go on and on and is less
pleasing to the ear.
We now examine a few issues related to e-mail. An important one
concerns what to do with the e-mails. There is a lack of rigor in e-mail
threads, which makes it unsafe to delete all but the latest e-mail on a
topic, although the send-reply threads within the e-mail may have captured
the entire life cycle of the e-mail. If they must be retained, a good option
would be to retain them in folders at a high level of granularity: Project
A or Project A-QA. Trying to organize them with any more granularity is
not worth the effort.
Why are so many people copied on every e-mail? This is a coupling
problem. It is a partitioning problem. It is also a push-pull problem. There
are many who are convinced that all those who are likely to be impacted
now or later, by any piece of information contained in that e-mail, should
be included in the distribution. All project members are coupled together
all the time. It is easier to send to an entire distribution list than to partition
a list each time. It is also driven by the need to deflect possible complaints
and excuses from others that they “were not informed.” People may be
added to the copy line just to draw attention to one's achievements up
the chain. The net result, however, is e-mail clutter of gigantic proportions.
Some people use copying e-mail as an implicit escalation, a preemptive
move. For example, it implies that “your boss is seeing this request; you
better respond to it.” Doing it all the time, and for trivial or routine actions,
dulls the effectiveness of the tactic. There is also no assurance that the
manager is paying attention to it anyway.
Copying e-mail has changed the information dynamics within organ-
izations. We would recommend that organizations or teams operate accord-
ing to well-defined policies made known to all employees or team
members. Here is one that we proposed:
. The senders keep the e-mail permanently.
Receivers delete them more frequently. If the receiver needs an e-
Sender only policy
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