Email: 7 hints to handle it with care

Email is one of those things we take for granted these days. It has been there for years. For some of us it is much more frequent to send an email than to make a phone call. It is one of the most essential and mundane tools in an interconnected age. As such it would be wise to learn some basics and tricks that could help us to make the most of it, and foremost, to avoid pitfalls that could lead we to some really bitter experiences.

Here are 7 hints to handle it properly: 

1. 5 FINGERS, 5 Emails. If you come into a thread of more than four or five emails coming back and forth, do not send another one. Either the message is too complex to communicate through email or something is not clear enough. Pick-up the phone and talk to the other person, or organize a conference call so you can get it straight. 

2. NEVER EVER, ever, write an email angry. If you come into a disagreement or something really disappoints you, do not write an email until you make sure you have cooled down completely. Otherwise you risk raising wheals that you may not want to raise. Especially if there are people copied. I learned this one the hard way years ago. 

3. TARGET only people that really need to know what you are talking about. It is annoying to get an email copied to the entire company because the sender tries to get a quick response. Also avoid a cc. to the CIO or the CEO on your first attempt to escalate an issue. You don’t want to jump too high too soon. 

If you are unsure ask your manager or team lead. They have a better line of sight than you and they may even want to take some subjects up by themselves. 

4. SUBJECT line is there for reason. Use it to communicate directly what the email is about. This will save some valuable time and focus. If you need something back you can try something like: Advice Required> or Answer Required> or Action Required>, followed by the topic. Take advantage of abbreviations like FYI, FW, RE or NWR. 

5. KEEP it simple. You are writing an email, not a science fiction novel. As such you should be able to communicate a point in three lines or less. Otherwise it is too much and you would lose the attention of your reader. You should have only a few points to cover in the entire email. 

Some of us tend to write with many words and accounting details. If you are like us then take the time to properly craft it and summarize it. Also feel free to question if you need a call or a meeting instead. 

6. LAYOUT is your friend. You can cover different points for different audiences in the same email. In these cases it is pretty useful to use bullets, bold fonts, changes in margins or colors to accommodate it in a way that is clean and easy to understand for the different parties involved. 

MS Outlook has configuration options to allow you use a different color every time you reply to an email thread. A similar color trick can also become handy for example when you are replying with answers to questions. 

7. EMAILS don’t get things done. PEOPLE get things done. This is a very important one because we tend to forget about it. At the end of the day Email is not a real time communication tool. There are several reasons while our urgent email can sit in an inbox for quite a while. If you urgently need an action make sure to pick up the phone. 

Till next week! 

- Sergio Calvo

Let's Follow the Sun!

My Saturday this past weekend started at 3:45 am local time to do some cool Project Management for the day. I had to take over at 4:00 am from a fellow Project Manager that started our weekend’s work the day before. It would have been very hard for her to stay overnight, however it was more manageable since she was working from a time zone a couple of hours behind me. For the next 8 hours I was the main point of coordination between our customers, located in a time zone a few hours ahead of me, and our technical teams split in three different continents. After my shift, another fellow Project Manager would continue with our work and then I would came to work for another 4 hours and finish our agreed deliverable for the weekend, by the end of the day.

This model of work is called follow the sun and it is the de facto work model in any global corporation nowadays. Such a name reflects the fact that at any given time is daytime somewhere around the world. So if you have people from all over the world working together, you can take advantage of it by having someone making progress at all times; without the need to burn any team member. Even if you work in a medium or small business, you are very likely to come across this type of situation if your customer is a company of certain size, or is based in a different time zone. This involves a series of challenges that are not to be taken lightly. 

As I rest from the very demanding journey I had yesterday; I share here a few tips to help you meet that kind of challenge. 

Wait a second! – You may be thinking something like: ok, why should I care about joining such a thing that you call a model of work? Well there are different factors. First, if you work for a corporation or in an industry where you interact a lot with customers from around the world, this is the usual model. Whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not. If you really want to advance your career, you wont be able to avoid this kind of project forever. 

Then there is the nature of the project; there are cases like the project we are undertaking  now in which you deal with the information systems of big companies, systems that keep their operations running. There is no other time to work with them other than the weekend, following very specific protocols and executing to a very demanding and complex schedule. If we want to be successful in doing this kind of project, we need to align with its nature and inherent constraints.

Water in the Dessert – In this global setting you will work with lots of people doing several different things. Inside your company, with your customer and with the many third parties which are very likely to be involved. A fully developed and comprehensive contact list, including every team and every team member involved in the effort is like having water in the dessert. Without such a list the amount of time and energy that you will waste looking for the right folk that you require to perform a task is endless. 

Who is awake right now? – You must have some certainty about who is working or is ready to work at any given time. Given all the different time zones involved in a project you can’t take for granted that your colleague on the opposite corner of the world will be up and running at the very same time that you are. Plan ahead. If there are different shifts involved, you should require each team to confirm the team members that will be taking ownership of every shift. You should also get in touch beforehand with any colleagues from which you need participation, so they are aware and properly aligned when you require them to be. If you forgot about something, solved it inmediately.

Effective communication – You should manage communication effectively. Making sure that the message reached the other end, was understood as you intended to communicate it. More important you need to make sure that the message will trigger the pertinent action on time. Let's put it this way: sending an email or putting a request in a system has nothing to do with getting something done. An email sitting in an inbox, or a request aging in some system doesn’t do things. People do things. For the normal course of business you may have the luxury to wait some time to know if the email arrived or not, or to know if the request was attended or not. If time is constrained or if whatever you need to be done is important, at least use the chat. Ideally pickup the phone and talk to the person to make sure that both of you are on the same page. You need to use your judgment carefully to differentiate each situation. If you are not fully positive about something, communicate until you are positive. 

Emotional Intelligence – working long hours during the weekend, early in the morning or in the middle of the night is not something easy. No matter if you like to work hard or if you don’t need too much sleep. It is likely that you come into the need to wake someone up, or to call at a bad time, etc. Some people have flexible personalities and will be responsive to your requests; others are very structured and won’t react very positively to something like that. You need to have this reality present at all times and act with empathy in any interaction. 

Your work life balance – This kind on effort definitely has an impact in your work life balance, and in the life or your loved ones. Be mindful of their needs and align them with the efforts you are undertaking as part of the project. Remember that your team members and their the families will be also impacted. It is your responsibility to advocate in their favor in as much as possible. Plan ahead of time both your working time and your personal time. It is a very demanding pace that you will be required to accommodate, arrange with your employer and your management to get back some of the time you have invested. It would not be realistic to pretend to get back all of your time, but the goal is a healthy balance. Even if you don’t work in a global company, if you are involved in Project Management you will face this kind of situation at some point.

- Sergio Calvo

Leading Effective Meetings

Leading Effective Meetings

Meetings are the kind of thing that we take for granted in business life. We don´t usually ask ourselves about them, unless we are trapped in the middle of one. They can serve important job goals. They allow ideas to be shared among colleagues, information to be disseminated, required discussions to happen between stakeholders, and decisions to be made. On the other hand, they can also become true black holes of lost time, pointless conversations and discussions that don’t facilitate the pertinent decisions. This ends up in frustration for your team members, and a decrease in productivity. Which one sounds more familiar to you?

Let’s take my calendar as example. I reviewed the last month taking note of the time scheduled for meetings. It accounted for 41 out of my 160 working hours. That’s around 25% of my time! If we assume that my calendar is not particularly unusual, we could say that meetings can easily account for ¼ of the time of an organization. It is important to get them right. If you are a Project Manager the burden is heavier, you are expected to handle this things like you were breathing.

Before the meeting – take time to plan properly. Depending on the relevance of the meeting and its audience, this can mean only a few minutes, or an entire planning session. The basic questions need to be answered: Why do you need the meeting? What is the agenda? What is your desired outcome? Who do you need to be there? Can they make it? Which inputs do you need? Who is in charge of them? This will minimize the waste of time of gathering everyone just to discover that you don’t have what is needed to meet.

Send the agenda ahead of time, this will allow the attendees to familiarize with it. If appropriate, ask them to submit ahead of time any additional points they deem pertinent. Follow up with any participants presenting with you to confirm they are ready. If there were action items from a previous meeting, confirm with their owners as well.

During the meeting – set for you a reputation for starting on time. Besides the time savings that we discussed above, the word will spread and people will be less tempted to fall on late show ups. Follow the agenda, if someone triggers very different topic; defer it for another meeting if necessary. Otherwise you risk ending with a completely different meeting from the one you planned. Allow for questions or comments often, probably at the end of each topic. So you help comprehension or discussion.

After the meeting – Spend a few minutes right after the meeting to finish your notes, polish and send the meeting minute, and including your action items in the agenda. If you leave that for later you may end-up losing some ends and requiring follow-ups just to make sure what the point was. This is challenging if you are on back to back meetings; so make sure your notes are complete and clear enough to reproduce the information as soon as possible. In the meeting minute it is useful to note the action items on the top. Include the owner, description, and expected delivery date. This will call the attention of the corresponding team members. Another interesting trick is to submit the minute directly to them, and only copying the colleagues with no active items from that meeting.

Good luck with your next meeting!

- Sergio Calvo.