Whisper Down the Lane: The Importance of Effective Communication During a Web Redesign

“Communication is key.”  This overuse and often the under-implemented phrase is the basis for our next series of blogs.   While every executive is aware of the importance of effective and timely communication, it is often assumed that everyone involved in your business is equally aware of just how critical communication can be to the success and competitiveness of your business.

Your company’s staff, team members, and vendors all play a part in projects and meetings that make up your day-to-day business process and initiatives. Each one of those people is a conduit for communication, just as easily as they could be a bottleneck to that same goal. The solution to potential lags or breaks in communication more complex than ensuring your team is aware of the importance of effective and timely communication. While the concept of effective communication is usually “understood,” it’s not applied as often as anticipated.

Lags in communication dropped balls, missed the email, ignored voice mail and other forms of delayed responses may jeopardize the successful outcome of important projects.  At the very least, lags in communication cause timeline issues that translate into a loss of opportunities to either generate or protect revenues.

Manufacturing a Communication Scenario

In the case of a web development project, there are often internal and external team members involved from the start. Teams need to collaborate frequently on refining and revisiting their marketing strategy throughout the process to ensure its success. Depending on the culture of the company and people involved, communication guidelines are often lost if existing at all because it is assumed everyone just “knows” or because it’s “common sense” to one, it must be obvious to everyone else.

Effective communication, and successful website development projects, need a stronger communication strategy, with involvement from the entire team – beginning with its leadership – and distributed through the project’s point person.

Even more critical? When executive management is involved in the communication timeline. Often times, executives parachute near the tail end of development when changes are complex and costly.  This critical and common error usually leads to unbudgeted expenses but could have been avoided by intervention during previous milestone check-ins.

In this upcoming series of posts, our goals are to examine:

• How to define and identify effective communication.
• How it is obtained and nurtured when there are different tiers of team members involved in any effort.
• How technology can affect, support, or diminish effective communication.
• How to identify interconnectivity of function and processes that can help develop a good communication strategy.
• The importance of a central point person for any initiative.
• How to get the best communication efforts from your team.
• How R & D and Manufacturing can be an inspiration for developing a strong and effective communication strategy.
• When, how, and how often senior management should get involved in the project communication strategy.

Communication is too often taken for granted as a given or of “obvious importance” that has no assigned owner or visible description in the process.  Invisible like air, communication only becomes top of mind, deliberate and consciously needed, when identified as the root to a salient problem.  Check back with us to simultaneously enhance your team’s communication strategy and streamline your projects and business processes.