The 10-to-1 rule of email project management: Follow up

In August of this year, I published some thoughts on how effective email is when it is used as the only or main communication tool for a project. The post became part of a discussion on multiple blogs so I shall try to pull the arguments together and provide my inchoate conclusion.

The piece was referenced by Konrad Marx, Stowe Boyd, Seth Gottlieb and Kurt Voelker. Stu Downes and Pranshu Jain left comments pointing out that collaboration solutions are still in an experimental phase compared to email. Paul Wilkinson points to an article he wrote in February 2006, questioning email capabilities of collaboration tools. Rodolpho Arruda adds that project manager certification focuses on controlling a project, not on collaborating within a project. Jim McGee points us to the danger in assuming that sent messages will be effectively received: "That is not a symmetry that can be safely assumed." Om Malik says that email is our "communication dashboard."

Anne Zelenka responds with a robust defense of email, saying that "email is good enough for most workers’ collaboration needs." She provides a convincing argument that email works better than many collaboration tools because is offers interoperability, personalised organisation, easy access control, and a single point of information access. I agree with many of Anne's points but I also accept Luis Suarez's view that email "is the worst thing that could have happened to Knowledge Management and remote collaboration [...]." John Tropea goes further by comparing closed systems with transparent ones and sharing a case study on email collaboration.

JP Rangaswami delights us with a taxonomy of enterprise email stereotypes, from the "iceberg lettuce" type to the "oops-I-did-it-again'ers" (the ones who habitually hit reply-all to wide distribution emails). He also agrees with Anne that email is a good enough collaboration tool, but for individuals not for teams in an enterprise.

Ed Yourdon published some of his thoughts about email at about the same time that I penned my 10-to-1 rule. In his superb post, he examines five hypotheses about email; one of them is whether email is broken or whether it is not being used the right way: "We never learned how to use the capabilities of email, and our behavior is akin to driving a car on the freeway at 60 mph in first gear."

Rod Boothby provides an illustration of "The Enterprise 2.0 Communication Continuum" and goes further to state three reasons for adopting collaboration tools that offer more than email:

• They create positive externalities because of transparency, context and the persistence of the content
• They increase the pace of internal innovation by providing what innovation creators need
• They provide a platform that can improve ad-hoc workflows

What are the conclusions? Discussions like this make me believe that we will find solutions in the fusion of paradigms and technologies that we presently see as conflicting.

Email is about messages and messages have proven useful for thousands of years. (Part of the reason that RSS is successful is that a feed can be presented as messages). Email software takes the strong conventions pertaining to messages and integrates them with the centuries old inbox paradigm - which itself was a way to transition from an industrial society to the information processing organisation by mimicking a conveyor belt. Altogether a very powerful concept which is the reason that email is how work gets done in today's businesses.

It is only for a decade or so that we have achieved the ability to work together in the new ways that we have started to call collaboration. Our challenge is to explore what we can do with collaboration while weaving into it the message style of communication. Messages and inboxes (a.k.a. email) are an undeniable part of the future, but as concepts they will be fused with transparent, discoverable, content-persistent, workflow-enhancing, buddy-list-integrated, taggable and action-supporting collaboration tools.

Tags: collaboration email email inbox project management collaborative workspaces

Comments

[Rudolf Melik]

Enjoyed this discussion and your summary of the commentary. We are glad to bring this discussion to our own readers.

It amazes me that email could be "good enough" in a world where compliance and internal controls are such an imperative. If email is good enough in some environments now, surely it will be less and less adequate as the requirements for controls and documentation increase. We will be blogging more on this topic at www.talentontarget.com.

[Rodolpho]

Thanks for referring to my post.

Nice summary, a good contribution to the blogosphere!

[Francis Newman]

Lars, I find this debate really interesting. This has been the core issue that we have been tackling in our company. Your summing up could be a definition of what we have been doing all this time! Working in one industry (AEC) we have become specific to its particular needs, but the problem is a universal one. I completely agree with your position. The email model is not perfect, but it is the only practical way to do it. It is great to read the problems associated with collaborating using email are exactly the same as we have encountered, all of which we have solutions for. Drop me a line and have a look if you like.

Francis