A Place On The . Net

Where I work there is frequently a breakdown of communication that often results in frustration and frequently results in a failure to accomplish the desired goal.  Read that again, several times.  Please be absolutely sure you understand what I am saying.

I work for a 911 answering point.  When you call 911, my co-workers are supposed to communicate with you to get you the life saving help that you need.  Therefore is is reasonable for you to assume that all of the people I work with are experts in communication.  If not expert, they should at least be pretty darn good at it.

Sadly this is just not the case.  We screw up communication around here all the time.  I am a horrible example.  My failures in communication have cost time and money, ended friendships and ignited or fueled wars.  At least, so far, I don't believe that my failure to communicate well has cost any lives.

Example:  A user (dispatcher) was recently attempting to do something for which they did not have the necessary tools.  Specifically they were attempting to send a document to someone that some recipients couldn't read due to a lack of compatible software and other recipients found confusing to read because document formatting was not maintained.  This was the third such instance of this I had seen in as many weeks.  So I submitted the following to the help desk:

What I received 14 days later was:

As you can imagine, none of the goals I had in mind have been accomplished.

The failure is, if I'm honest, all mine.  I was in a rush and spewed my thought into my Thunderbird composer without giving it much thought.  My goals were so obvious to me that I assumed they would be just as obvious to the IT contractor.  My assumption completely missed the mark.

Hindsight being nearly perfect, I now see that my work request should stated my goals while being brief.  Hindsight has also been applied to my goals and I see now that installing OpenOffice, for reasons beyond the scope of this discussion, accomplishes very little in this instance.  Again, I was in a rush and hadn't thought things through.  So let's invest a moment and review my goals:

• Give users the ability to create PDF documents.
  • Users sometimes send documents to others and they don't know what software others may have to read those documents.  The Portable Document Format (PDF) was designed specifically to address this.
  • This should also include the ability to convert OpenDocument or Microsoft Office documents into PDF documents.
  • PDF files tend to retain their formatting for printing.  This means that if a user sends a document to someone, that person will view the document as the author had intended regardless of software, operating system or hardware.
• Communicate to users that they have have this ability.
  • Having the ability to do a thing doesn't help them accomplish tasks.  They need to know they have the ability, so they can take advantage of it.
  • Users need to know why they have this ability before they will use it.  Tell them what it does for them and why they will use it.
• Train the users to use the tool you're giving them.
  • If they don't know how to use it, what's the point in them having it?
  • An untrained user can often hurt themselves or others.  While it's true that this instance is "just software", this isn't always the case.
• Any tool that is selected for the purpose of PDF document creation must fit within my budget:
  • Free (as in beer) works nicely because I don't have a budget.
  • If free won't work then it should be a very small amount because I'll have to ask/beg for money.
    • While I'll champion this, it's not worth so much to me that I'll fight for hundreds of $$$ to accomplish this goal.  This is for an infrequent need.

In my first attempt to accomplish my goals, I had been willing to let the IT contractor select the tool to use.  Having thought about this, that's not ever a wise choice.  This is my goal, I should do the research and choose the tool that I feel accomplishes the goal.  The contractor should not be allowed to select a tool that benefits them, a tool selected that accomplishes my specific goals. 

Having thought about my goals and reviewed the original problem once again (a great way to refresh myself as to why I even have these goals), I set out to do the research myself.  In less than ten minutes I found several tools that would accomplish my goals.  One tool gave me several clear benefits that make it the obvious choice for me.

While I'm writing more about my communications problem than the solution to the PDF problem, I will say that I believe Zamzar is best suited to accomplish my goals.  As a web based solution, rather than software based, it does not require me to expend any of the valuable time my employer has purchased from our IT contractor.  That's like an added bonus.  All I have to do ismake my users aware of this solution with a well crafted email. 

In the end I've demonstrated yet again that haste leads to waste.  Rather than quickly delegating this to our IT contractor and assuming they would read my mind and accomplish my goals, I wasted their time, my time and caused a delay in the work the dispatcher was trying to accomplish. 

Instead I should have held back all communication on the matter until I had invested the time to identify my goals and research the solution.  At that point I could have communicated the solution.

Hopefully I'll learn from this and move on in a more productive manner.