Kollaboration Klutz
In my work over the last few months, I have become very facile with the phrase “the hidden costs of lost productivity.” That’s because I’m working with a large technology company, helping them position their product(s) that enable people to collaborate and communicate effectively, and the knock on the competition is that you lose productivity when people don’t understand how to use the tools you give them. Indeed.
Yesterday, I had to present my findings and conclusions at a large meeting. I was terrified and stressed out for the entire week preceding – not because I was concerned about the quality of my material or my presentation, but because part of my job was to organize the meeting itself. This involves the very basic collaboration function known as “calendaring and scheduling” – a process made simple and seamless by my client’s best-established piece of communication software. The problem here was not missing functionality. It was user error. Or perhaps, user ignorance.
I recently upgraded to my client’s very latest and greatest product, which not only lets you schedule people and facilities and issue invitations to participants, but also set up an online team workspace for the meeting, schedule a Web meeting with application sharing in real time, restrict access to files only to meeting participants, and many other wonderful things, all with the click of a mouse. I know this because I have been reading about it, writing about it and talking about it with all and sundry for the last 60 days. Regrettably, my understanding of this technology did not extend as far as the keyboard, as I found out to my horror when I tried to take advantage of all of these tools for my own purposes.
First I misread people’s availability, and so had to schedule two separate meetings to cover the same information, because it was not possible to get everyone together at once in the same timeframe. Many of the invitees delegated attendance to subordinates, and there was considerable confusing crosstalk about who should and shouldn’t attend. Since I barely knew the principals and had no clue as to the roles and responsibilities of the others, I quickly became utterly baffled as to who should be coming, and ended up inviting a fair number of irate and irrelevant people.
These new attendees had additional availability issues, requiring another round of schedule wrangling. When I finally found a time that worked for all, my meeting request was rejected by the conference room I had selected, which issued an automatic cancellation notice to the entire list. I found another location, but included the conference room as a meeting participant rather than a resource, and so had to reissue the invitation again with the mistake corrected. Because of my failure to manage my invitation list properly, a number of people who had informed me in the last round that they would not, could not, or should not be coming to this meeting were invited again, to their great and vocal annoyance.
What made all of this so spectacularly embarrassing is that the people I was inviting to the meeting were the top executives responsible for developing this collaboration technology, and the goal of the meeting was to present evidence of how much simpler their products were to use than the competition. It was as if inviting the Steinway family to a recital on their top-of-the-line piano, and repeatedly botching the playing of “Chopsticks.”
To my great surprise and relief, come Friday, a few of the attendees managed to figure out when and where the gathering was scheduled despite the welter of confusing and contradictory invitations. Having surmounted (or at least outlasted) the primary challenge of getting everyone together in the same place and time, I was able to speak with relaxed and confident authority on the simplicity, user-centricity and power of the next generation of enterprise collaboration tools, and how, through their design genius, my client could promise reductions – perhaps even the elimination! – of the hidden costs of lost productivity.
11:04:29 AM 
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