IT doesn’t help itself

One of the things you find in service delivery is communication. How you communicate with the business sponsor, the user community has a big impact on your working relationship, presenting the facts, explaining how you’re dealing with issues is just as important as doing the work. Let’s illustrate this, let’s use the example of a your servers not being racked on time, delaying the build process.

“Your servers are going to be two days late, meaning they probably wont get racked in time, what shall we do about it?” - the world has ended kind of message

“There has been an issue with the delivery of your servers, we’re working to ensure that we change the plans accordingly, and will try and minimize any delay to your project.” - It’s the same message in essence, however I’ve showed that there is an issue, we’re dealing with it, we’re containing it and delivery remains key.

Negativity tends to lead to emotional conversations and further negativity creating an ever fulfiling circle, if you expect a negative outcome it’s all to easy to achieve it.

Remove any emotion in your message, this is the problem, this is how we’re attempting to limit impact, how we’ll deal with it going forward. Remember that an email, a conversation can be taken out of context easily. Also keep in mind that a conversation is often more effective than an email, the barriers tend to be down. You’d be surprised the difference that can be made by maintaing the nice things, “how are we”, “what’s going in the world of risk today”, and then introduce the conversation.