Communicate

Communicate!

I believe that it is better to be looked over than it is to be overlooked.

Mae West, Belle of the Nineties, 1934

Maybe we can learn a lesson from Ms. West. It's not just what you've got, but also how you package it. Having the best ideas, the finest code, or the most pragmatic thinking is ultimately sterile unless you can communicate with other people. A good idea is an orphan without effective communication.

As developers, we have to communicate on many levels. We spend hours in meetings, listening and talking. We work with end users, trying to understand their needs. We write code, which communicates our intentions to a machine and documents our thinking for future generations of developers. We write proposals and memos requesting and justifying resources, reporting our status, and suggesting new approaches. And we work daily within our teams to advocate our ideas, modify existing practices, and suggest new ones. A large part of our day is spent communicating, so we need to do it well.

We've put together a list of ideas that we find useful.

Know What You Want to Say

Probably the most difficult part of the more formal styles of communication used in business is working out exactly what it is you want to say. Fiction writers plot out their books in detail before they start, but people writing technical documents are often happy to sit down at a keyboard, enter "1. Introduction," and start typing whatever comes into their heads next .

Plan what you want to say. Write an outline. Then ask yourself, "Does this get across whatever I'm trying to say?" Refine it until it does.

This approach is not just applicable to writing documents. When you're faced with an important meeting or a phone call with a major client, jot down the ideas you want to communicate, and plan a couple of strategies for getting them across.

Know Your Audience

You're communicating only if you're conveying information. To do that, you need to understand the needs, interests, and capabilities of your audience. We've all sat in meetings where a development geek glazes over the eyes of the vice president of marketing with a long monologue on the merits of some arcane technology. This isn't communicating: it's just talking, and it's annoying. ^[5]

^[5] The word annoy comes from the Old French enui, which also means "to bore."

Form a strong mental picture of your audience. The acrostic wisdom, shown in Figure 1.1 on the following page, may help.

Figure 1.1. The wisdom acrostic ”understanding an audience

Say you want to suggest a Web-based system to allow your end users to submit bug reports. You can present this system in many different ways, depending on your audience. End users will appreciate that they can submit bug reports 24 hours a day without waiting on the phone. Your marketing department will be able to use this fact to boost sales. Managers in the support department will have two reasons to be happy: fewer staff will be needed, and problem reporting will be automated. Finally, developers may enjoy getting experience with Web-based client-server technologies and a new database engine. By making the appropriate pitch to each group , you'll get them all excited about your project.

Choose Your Moment

It's six o'clock on Friday afternoon, following a week when the auditors have been in. Your boss's youngest is in the hospital, it's pouring rain outside, and the commute home is guaranteed to be a nightmare. This probably isn't a good time to ask her for a memory upgrade for your PC.

As part of understanding what your audience needs to hear, you need to work out what their priorities are. Catch a manager who's just been given a hard time by her boss because some source code got lost, and you'll have a more receptive listener to your ideas on source code repositories. Make what you're saying relevant in time, as well as in content. Sometimes all it takes is the simple question "Is this a good time to talk about ?"

Choose a Style

Adjust the style of your delivery to suit your audience. Some people want a formal "just the facts" briefing. Others like a long, wide- ranging chat before getting down to business. When it comes to written documents, some like to receive large bound reports, while others expect a simple memo or e-mail. If in doubt, ask.

Remember, however, that you are half of the communication transaction. If someone says they need a paragraph describing something and you can't see any way of doing it in less than several pages, tell them so. Remember, that kind of feedback is a form of communication, too.

Make It Look Good

Your ideas are important. They deserve a good-looking vehicle to convey them to your audience.

Too many developers (and their managers) concentrate solely on content when producing written documents. We think this is a mistake. Any chef will tell you that you can slave in the kitchen for hours only to ruin your efforts with poor presentation.

There is no excuse today for producing poor-looking printed documents. Modern word processors (along with layout systems such as LaTeX and troff) can produce stunning output. You need to learn just a few basic commands. If your word processor supports style sheets, use them. (Your company may already have defined style sheets that you can use.) Learn how to set page headers and footers. Look at the sample documents included with your package to get ideas on style and layout. Check the spelling, first automatically and then by hand. After awl, their are spelling miss steaks that the chequer can knot ketch.

Involve Your Audience

We often find that the documents we produce end up being less important than the process we go through to produce them. If possible, involve your readers with early drafts of your document. Get their feedback, and pick their brains . You'll build a good working relationship, and you'll probably produce a better document in the process.

Be a Listener

There's one technique that you must use if you want people to listen to you: listen to them. Even if this is a situation where you have all the information, even if this is a formal meeting with you standing in front of 20 suits ”if you don't listen to them, they won't listen to you.

Encourage people to talk by asking questions, or have them summarize what you tell them. Turn the meeting into a dialog, and you'll make your point more effectively. Who knows , you might even learn something.

Get Back to People

If you ask someone a question, you feel they're impolite if they don't respond. But how often do you fail to get back to people when they send you an e-mail or a memo asking for information or requesting some action? In the rush of everyday life, it's easy to forget. Always respond to e-mails and voice mails , even if the response is simply "I'll get back to you later." Keeping people informed makes them far more forgiving of the occasional slip, and makes them feel that you haven't forgotten them.

Tip 10

It's Both What You Say and the Way You Say It

Unless you work in a vacuum , you need to be able to communicate. The more effective that communication, the more influential you become.

E-Mail Communication

Everything we've said about communicating in writing applies equally to electronic mail. E-mail has evolved to the point where it is main-stay of intra- and intercorporate communications. E-mail is used to discuss contracts, to settle disputes, and as evidence in court . But for some reason, people who would never send out a shabby paper document are happy to fling nasty-looking e-mail around the world.

Our e-mail tips are simple:

• Proofread before you hit .

• Check the spelling.

• Keep the format simple. Some people read e-mail using proportional fonts, so the ASCII art pictures you laboriously created will look to them like hen-scratchings.

• Use rich-text or HTML formatted mail only if you know that all your recipients can read it. Plain text is universal.

• Try to keep quoting to a minimum. No one likes to recieve back their own 100-line e-mail with "I agree" tacked on.

• If you're quoting other people's e-mail, be sure to attribute it, and quote it inline (rather than as an attachment).

• Don't flame unless you want it to come back and haunt you later.

• Check your list of recipients before sending. A recent Wall Street Journal article described an employee who took to distributing criticisms of his boss over departmental e-mail. without realizing that his boss was included on the distribution list.

• Archive and organize your e-mail “both the import stuff you receive and the mail you send.

As various microsoft and Netscape employees discovered during the 1999 Department of Justice investigation, e-mail is forever. Try to give the same attention and care to e-mail as you would to any written memo or report.