At my work environment, I have five ways to discuss a topic:
- Face to face conversations
- Instant Message
- Issue tracker/job website
- Wiki
Aside from the general problem of deciding which system to use for a particular discussion, each of these has their own flaws.
Face to face conversations are very nice, but they don’t allow you to do anything else, which means everyone involved has to have free time, at the same time. That really doesn’t work in an office where everyone is busy from the moment they walk in the door to the moment they leave. Another problem is the conversation disappears once you stop talking, you can’t refer back to it later. We might have a conversation today about something that won’t be acted on until 2 months later.
Instant messages solve these problems to some degree, you can have multiple conversations at once (as long as the person isn’t completely occupied or out of the office). But it’s still difficult to involve multiple people in the same discussion. And while there are records of the discussion in my IM program’s logs, they are poorly organised, and i can only see my discussions, not my colleagues discussions on the same topic.
Don’t even get me started on emails, they’re just a mess. Full of spam and/or unimportant emails, difficult to organise, and you never get a prompt response when it is required.
Issue Tracker/Job websites are one of my favourites. there’s a lot of software in this category, my tools of choice are Redmine and the Google Code issue tracker. They solve all the problems of a face to face discussion and an instant message discussion, but they’re even worse than emails when a prompt response is required, so they are sadly under used.
Wiki’s are a really good fit for discussions, but just don’t quite cut it. A wiki isflexible enough to be used for almost any task, but there’s almost no structure, and there is no way at all to notify people of a change you just made. Also, it’s a bit cumbersome to make changes. They’re perfect for something that doesn’t change often, but totally useless when it does.
Google wave appears (I’ve never used it) just like a wiki, except it has structure and it informs the relevant people that changes have been made (either right away, or when they are next available). I’m hoping, in the long run, to replace not just email and instant message with google wave, but also issue trackers and wikis.
October 02, 2009, 9:41am Comments
