Workshop in a Box: Communication Skills for IT Professionals

Abhinav Kaiser

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783000777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book is for anyone who works with technology and wants to develop their communication skills. If you want to develop better working, relationships, communicate your ideas more effectively, and build a wider culture of collaboration and understanding, this book has been created for you.

Workshop in a Box: Communication Skills for IT Professionals

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Workshop in a Box: Communication Skills for IT Professionals

Copyright © 2015 Impackt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

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First published: April 2015

Production Reference: 1280415

Published by Impackt Publishing Ltd.

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ISBN 978-1-78300-076-0

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Credits

Author

Abhinav Kaiser

Reviewer

M. S. Xavier Pradheep Singh

Acquisition Editor

Richard Gall

Content Development Editor

Amey Varangaonkar

Copy Editor

Sharvari H. Baet

Project Coordinator

Rashi Khivansara

Proofreaders

Simran Bhogal

Maria Gould

Paul Hindle

Vikrant Phadke

Graphics

Abhinash Sahu

Production Coordinator

Melwyn D'sa

Cover Work

Simon Cardew

About the Author

Abhinav Kaiser works as a Consulting Manager for a leading consulting firm. He has more than 12 years of experience in IT management consulting, IT management training, business process consulting, project management, transition management, and IT service management, among others.

He has helped organizations create value through IT, and has designed and implemented IT management solutions for smooth and efficient functioning of IT environments. He has trained thousands of IT professionals in soft skills and on management topics.

Abhinav has earned the Project Management Professional (PMP), ITIL Expert, and COBIT certifications. He blogs on communication and management on his weblog at http://abhinavpmp.com. His articles also appear on Tech Republic and Pluralsight.

He is from Bangalore, India and currently lives in Sydney, Australia. He is married and has a 5-year-old daughter.

I would like to first express my thanks to all my customers, without whom I would not have landed with rich and valuable experiences, stories, and incidents that have shaped every word in this book. Peers and friends likewise have been a part of the learning journey and still are. I would also like to thank my family who understood my additional responsibilities as an author, and ended up spending very less family time than usual. Lastly, I would like to thank Impackt Publishing for running with my idea, and supporting me through this journey.

About the Reviewer

M. S. Xavier Pradheep Singh has been teaching English language and literature at V. O. Chidambaram College, Tuticorin, Tamil Nadu, India, since 2009. His doctoral research was on enhancing English language skills through virtual learning environments. His areas of interest in teaching include communication skills, language skills, writing for print and web, and English language teaching.

Xavier is tech-savvy and is vigorously involved in researching and using technology innovatively in his classroom settings. He has also been a trainer in more than 15 workshops for English language teachers on computer-assisted language teaching organized by ELTAI, RELO, and IATEFL. He edits and reviews articles for the following journals, both in print and online: Cuckoo, Journal of Teaching English with Technology, Journal of Technology for ELT, Journal of Teaching and Research in English Literature, Langlit, and Literary Voyage. So far, Xavier has spoken in three international and seven national conferences on teacher education and web skills. His research articles have been published in various international journals, including, Journal of NELTA from Nepal, Voices from England, ACJELL from India, and TEwT from Poland.

With the help of a scholarship from the British Council, Xavier visited Bangladesh to participate in the Hornby Regional School held in Dhaka in 2011. He has completed two online teacher training courses offered by the University of Oregon, USA. More information on him is available at http://xavierpradheepxing.eu5.org. He can be contacted at <[email protected]>. He posts blogs at http://pradheeponline.blogspot.in and shares his slideshows at http://www.slideshare.net/pradheepxing.

Preface

How can I standardize communication across the organization? What can I do to ensure that my employees are productive and efficient? What measures should I take to keep the communication channels between employees and customers open and transparent? Why are so many conflicts creeping in every now and then?

The solutions to these problems are in this book. Many organizations concentrate on honing technical skills and give little importance to communication. It is a fact that employees spend more time communicating than doing their respective core activities. In this scenario, not giving communication improvement due consideration is an opportunity wasted when it comes to getting the most out of them.

In today's competitive world, communication in business is no longer simply regarded as a humble "soft skill" that is an extension of the employee's primary skills. The importance of communication skills is such that it is perhaps now a skill that is valued more than, say, technical and management skills. Of course, technical expertise is essential, but with an increasingly educated workforce leaving university, there should be—in theory at least—a wealth of talent for organizations to choose from. Great communication skills can make an individual stand out, and can make them an invaluable member of a team.

It is certainly worthwhile putting in the time and effort to develop your team's skills; whether someone considers themselves a great communicator or they readily admit that communication is not their forte, there is always room to improve! Before you begin to develop your communication skills or help others develop theirs, it is essential to get a grounding in the basics of communication. Getting to the heart of the matter and understanding exactly what is going on every time you communicate is the first step to being a great communicator.

This book aims to help you out in running your own workshop with your teams, rather than bringing in a consultant like me, which is bound to be expensive. Also, you will have the flexibility of running it a number of times, anytime, and at locations of your choice. Through this book, you can readily fix your current communication structure and take measures to make communication between teams effective and reap the benefits of increased productivity.

When I go out on consulting assignments, I have witnessed firsthand that the right hand of an organization doesn't talk to the left hand. They are left hanging in between, and this results in a great amount of rework and a substantial increase in operating costs. In one case, a team was carrying out their work but never bothered to update anybody, nor did they have any system of logging what they did. This led to panicky stakeholders who had to chase up multiple times. Consequently, managers of this team did not have any clue whether job was done or not. They ended up acting as middlemen between the engineers on the floor and customers. This in turn resulted in a lot of wasted time in getting the update and passing it on to the customer. This is where I came in and introduced a system where the customers were able to obtain updates by themselves on a real-time basis by logging in to a portal. The onus was on the engineers to keep the status updates posted whenever there was something substantial to report. This solution ensured that customers got what they wanted, and the organization serving them could effectively manage expectations and communications through real-time reporting.

IT is becoming an increasingly large part of business life—although IT departments may have been secondary to an organization's operations and strategy in the past, in today's highly connected and digitized environment, they are the lifeblood of a business. IT departments certainly have more responsibility than they have ever had before. I have written this book keeping IT as the focus, although it can be used with any other non-IT teams as well. In fact, this book should be used by managers who head IT teams and who are ready to run their own workshops to improve communication—end to end.

I did not study communication in college. My academic background is in engineering and I currently work as a consultant. This book is an outcome of the education I have gained during my consulting experience, and from my cognizance of existing communication systems in organizations. During the course of the workshop, I will throw light on some relevant real-life examples. I am certain that you will be able to relate to a number of cases that I discuss, which will help you bring up the cases during your training sessions.

What you will learn in this book

Chapter 1, Communication Training, introduces a number of topics related to communication, quality, and training. This chapter acts as a launchpad for running the workshop.

Chapter 2, From Governance to Communication, equips you with all the tools and techniques necessary to run the workshop, including templates, checklists, and all other accessories.

Chapter 3, Written Communication, looks at written communication and its various flavors—e-mails, mailers, notifications, visuals, infographics, and process maps.

Chapter 4, Listening and Questioning for Effective Communication, gives you all of the ammunition you need to be an effective communicator, without which the shallowness of your communication stands exposed.

Chapter 5, Telephone Communication, specifically looks at communicating over the telephone. We discuss the importance of listening before speaking and tips for improving listening skills.

Chapter 6, Face-to-face Communication, discusses the nuances of face-to-face communication. This chapters hovers...

Table of contents

• Workshop in a Box: Communication Skills for IT Professionals