Communicating Effectively

Interpreting how a message was meant often depends upon the person receiving the message more than it does on how the message is delivered.  Several people can hear the exact same message and each interpret it differently. 

While viewing and listening to the message in this assignment, I did not feel that there was much change from one modality to the next.  The email and voicemail sounded possibly more desperate, but other than that I thought all three were very similar with somewhat of an understanding that Mark was busy but that Jane was in desperate need of his report.  I was not compelled to think that Jane had any ill will toward Mark at any point, and only felt she needed his work in order to do her work.

As far as my perception of the messages goes, the email is less personable because there is no voice contact for the listener to hear the tone of the voice, so it may have come across a tad more desperate.  Since all three contained the exact same information, I perceived that this was incredibly important to Jane and that she was not at all angry with Mark because he had not provided her the information.

The voicemail displayed the true meaning and intent of the message because it showed that Jane was kind and sympathetic to the situation and merely wanted the information she needed to complete her work.

I feel that Jane communicated very effectively with Mark to help get the information she needed.  She displayed kindness, sympathy, and a little bit of desperation to her co-worker, which, in most cases, would cause the co-worker to feel sorry for her and provide the information she needed.  More often than not, demanding behavior or anger is not the proper way to communicate with anyone, especially someone that is involved in the same project.

Learning from a Project “ Post-mortem”

For a previous employer, I participate in the implementation of three new systems for the Accounting Department.  My direct supervisor was the project lead for our company and I was the first point of contact for the entire finance tower, which included approximately 200 people from an outside organization.  When the project started, my job as an Administrative Assistant did not include project support, but I eventually become more of a project coordinator with the vast majority of my work supporting the project team and not my employer. 

The project team was charged with implementing a new accounting system, a new time-reporting system, and a new expense-reporting system.  I was not very involved with the new accounting system, but I participated heavily with the other two systems from the beginning, including demo selection for each. While I did not actively participate in the work that was being done by the project team, they relied on my extensively for support in other ways.  Once the project work was near completion, I was recruited to be a trainer for my company’s employees for the expense and time reporting systems, as I had extensive familiarity with these system’s operations and the language that was permitted for the systems to operate effectively.

Even though I was not a member of the project team, I had excellent rapport with them and I was able to include some key processes that allowed employees to better understand the new systems.  The team had neglected to include any comparisons between the old systems and the new systems so that employees could relate the necessary steps needed to perform the operations correctly.  I was able to update the training material and training sessions with screen shots and additional information making the new systems relevant for employees to better comprehend.

My supervisor did, however, limit the amount of updating I could include in the training materials and unfortunately for employees of my company, a better learning experience could have been possible with more expansion of the material.  I understand that she may have felt that since we were paying this company to produce the material, interference on our behalf was not necessary; however, since it was for the benefit of our employees, we could have avoided unnecessary questions later on by including more.  The majority of questions posed could have been prevented if we would have involved ourselves more with the training material because “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” (Achong, T.).

The Project Manager for the project team was incredibly stressed and overall he did a good job with what he had to work with.  The biggest contribution he could have made to improve upon the process would have been to ensure we had at least one member of our company assisting the project team throughout the process of developing material. This one simple step could have assured that all of the information presented was conveyed accordingly.  Another improvement he could have made would have been to have the project trainers use the company’s computers to double-check the material and guarantee that the step-by-step instructions were applicable on our equipment.  Instead he relied solely on his project team of trainers to develop the material and therefore it was a huge disaster when the material was rolled out.

References

Anchong, T. (2011). Practitioner voices: overcoming “scope creep””. (Video Program). Laureate Education, Inc.