Message Not Received: Why Business Communication Is Broken and How to Fix It

8Life Beyond E-MailHow Progressive Organizations Are Using New Tools to Enable More Effective Collaboration and Communication

I continue to get further away from the usual painter’s tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc.

—Jackson Pollock

In the Preface I mentioned that I used to work for the consulting firm CSC in the mid-2000s. On my first engagement for my new employer in February 2004, I consulted on a massive system implementation for a 13-site hospital system based in the mid-Atlantic United States. Call it Vamanos Health here, although the name is a pseudonym.^a A brief trip down memory lane will show the sea change that has taken place regarding project management and collaboration tools.

Communication and Collaboration Circa 2004

Vamanos signed a $5 million contract with CSC to provide consulting services supporting its new enterprise system. The CSC team consisted of six full-time individuals, including a partner, technical and functional consultants, and proper project manager (PM). We descended on Vamanos’s headquarters from different locations across the country every Monday morning. We left every Thursday afternoon barring some type of crisis.

Replacing disparate back-office systems at more than a dozen hospitals has never been a small endeavor. (I’ll just leave it at that here.) This was the antithesis of a weekend hackathon in which sleep-deprived, T-shirt clad Millennials throw ideas and code against the wall, eventually producing a working prototype. ...