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Communication basics

4 min read

Audience analysis is the first step to effective communication. Perform a basic audience analysis by answering some simple questions:

Is the audience technical or non-technical?

How much do they know about the topic?

How much do they care about the topic?

What is the intended message for this audience?

Before sending one email or setting up a meeting, answer these questions. People are inundated with communication from email, voicemail, Twitter, social media, internal web/wikis, text, IM, and meeting requests.

Communicating internally

Internal customers could be people who use general computing and call a helpdesk for support, the organization’s software developers or engineering team, senior management, or researchers, students, faculty, or others. The type of customers depends upon the type of organization and the industry.

Working with internal customers could be as simple as being the “Ops” side of a DevOps team or it could mean supporting a wide range of technologies used by customers at varying levels of technical understanding.

When operations focuses on a specific project or works with a specific team, such as engineering or software development, communication is generally specific to that work. It can take on the form of meetings, video conferencing, chat sessions, and emails between team members. A communications culture tends to develop in these scenarios as team members figure out the best way to coordinate with one another.

When operations focuses on more general IT support, communication becomes more complicated for the operations people. Factors such as audience analysis play a larger role in successful communication with customers. Operations faces a potentially wide array of communications scenarios:

  • Announcing outages to general staff in a large organization

  • Announcing upcoming maintenance to a set of staff impacted by a service outage

  • Broadcasting a technical idea to a non-technical audience

  • Contacting internal customers impacted by a security issue or vulnerability (e.g. Run this update. Install this patch.)

  • Asking middle management across the organization to weigh in on a potential service change

  • Offering a seminar, workshop, or class to assist customers with a new or modified service for a general audience

  • Offering a seminar, workshop, or class to assist customers with a new or modified service for a non-technical audience

  • Presenting the service catalog in a question-and-answer session

  • Meeting with senior management to address an operations problem, budget shortfall, request more resources, or propose an architectural change

  • Meeting with customers to address service problems

  • Meeting with specific groups of customers to collect requirements for a special project

  • Requesting feedback from customers either individually or as a group

  • Meeting with customers who are engaged in the subject matter

  • Meeting with customers who are disengaged or in attendance because it is mandatory

This list spans a wide range of communication modes, communication types, customers, and outcomes.

  • communication modes email, meetings, larger presentations, surveys

  • communication types persuasive communication, instructional, informational

  • diverse customer backgrounds management, administrative staff, technical staff, IT-savvy, non-IT-savvy, interested, disinterested

  • desired outcomes management decision, increased understanding, increased abilities, increased awareness

Communicating externally

Communicating with external customers can offer additional challenges. If the external customers are customers of the organization, there is the possibility that dealings with them could result in a complaint to upper management.

Reduce complaints by considering how to communicate with these external customers. When communicating about a service outage, consider timing of the outage, duration, and impact of the outage on these external customers. Are most external customers in the same time zone? If so, then the maintenance window could be outside of traditional working hours. If external customers include international people in varying timezones, the outage window may be the one that impacts core customers the least.

Communicate the timing of service outages with management. It is best if management knows that external customers are about to be impacted by operations. Include a justification for the maintenance: why is it necessary, why this outage window, why this duration, plan B in case the outage goes beyond the outage window, method of communication with external customers? All of these pieces of information may not be necessary if operations already supports external customers on a regular basis.

There is significant breadth and depth required to effectively communicate.

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