ISDA Process Planning Kick Off Meeting
June 6, 2008
"Begin with the end in mind"

The questions we want to answer:
    a.    What's our communication process?
    b.    What's our decision making process?

• we don't always understand how decisions get made
• we don't always know what the the value is to the community
  • are we asking the right questions?
• can we have a balance between management and staff in these processes?  A collaborative approach that would need the managers to get the buy in
• what are the political aspects of our work?  We need to take those into consideration...
• goal is to come up with "best practices" that can be tweaked for ISDA

How do we want to approach tackling this?  Our process...

• work on a communication strategy first, then move on to decision making process
• each team member will answer the following questions:
  • how does communication currently happen?
  • what worked well and WHY?
  • what did not work well and WHY?
  • how would you like communication to happen?
• we will meet as a group and discuss these scenarios, then apply our suggestions to a hypothetical (Pat will draft) to see what works
• make recommendations based on hypothetical
• extrapolate out to decision making process if applicable
• present to management team

Next meeting: June 13, 2008 3pm Downtown Crossing

June 13, 2008

Kinds of communication: 

• difference between how it works within teams and between teams
• lateral vs vertical communication
• person to person vs distributing information to a group
• QUESTION: How do we communicate when we have an issue?

What helps communication:

• identifying resources and skills sets and reaching out, asking questions
• knowing what each other is doing on a daily basis
• cross training
• listening (and some times not listening when appropriate)
• filtering information as it comes down (when is it too much info and when is it not enough?)
• making sure you cover the WHY (often not communicated at lower levels)
• getting buy-in
• asking for input

Tools we use:

• daily vs weekly vs bi-weekly meetings
  • rotating who has responsibility for the agenda
• IM
• email
• Daptiv
• Jira
• RT
• Tech Time
• Phone
•  

Hypothetical for Thought

Team X has been working on a login application and the big release coming up.  Many of the company's applications will integrate with this service and be dependent on it.  The Team makes the decision that the product needs to be "rock solid", because if it goes down, so do all the apps that are using it.  The company as a whole does not do any standard quality assurance, and the Team believes that this is an issue.  They feel that due diligence includes QA for this service as well as other products being developed across the organization.  They want to begin investigating tools since testing would need to begin asap.  How should their needs and concerns be communicated?  How should the tool selection be conducted and a decision made?

Ideas on what to include in a communication strategy:

1. objectives
2. target audience or stakeholders (internal and external)
3. message you want to convey THE WHAT
4. tools (existing and new) THE HOW
5. resources you need
6. time line THE WHEN (frequency)
7. lessons learned