Hierarchy of Communication Channels

Effective communication is a requirement in a total quality management (TQM) organization. Fundamentally, communication is necessary to maintain the delivery of quality products and services as well as continually improving those products and services (Goetsch & Davis, 2021, p. 163-166).

In a team context, effective communication is necessary to set clearly defined objectives and expectations. Like Albuali (2021) states, “[r]unning a successful project needs various effective strategies for managing communication between upper and lower level employees.”

Albuali (2021) goes on to divide a hierarchy of communication channels: high-level, low-level, and moderate-level. High-level channels are basically in-person or by phone: face-to-face, department meetings, or phone conversations. A low-level channel is a quarterly meeting or a written memo. Moderate-level communication channels include email and intranet chat, and this provides a level of effective communication that is needed in many situations.

It is crucial for project managers and team leaders to choose the appropriate channel: using a high-level channel for each and every communication results in the message becoming noise; using low-level communication for important information can result in that information being missed.

This is not to say moderate-level communication channels are best: email can be sent to the “spam” folder after all. Being a written form of communication, the sender can inadvertently send ambiguous information. There is one value to emails that is not frequently mentioned: emails can be used for business process discovery.

In a 2012 paper, Stuit and Wortmann hit upon the idea of mining the data contained in emails so as to find patterns in human collaboration. These patterns can be interpreted as evidence for business processes. The method Stuit and Wortmann (2012) used involves not only looking for common sender-recipient pairs and dates, but also considers email threads and “boilerplate” messages. This information is collected by a tool called “E-mail Interaction Miner” (EIM) which discovers collaboration patterns.

Stuit and Wortmann evaluated this on the operator of the national gas transmission grid in the Netherlands, Gasunie Transport Services Inc. (GTS). In 2008, GTS allowed them to run EIM on a subset of their email messages relevant to a delayed IT project at GTS. Stuit and Wortmann were able to trace the history of this project, amd they were able to provide “GTS with actionable managerial insights that can initiate improvements in the interaction structure and resource planning of future infrastructural projects.”

GTS knew that their IT project was delayed, but they did not know why it was delayed. EIM was able to identify the sources of the delays, which can be used to improve the next IT project. Software, in this case EIM, thus participated in achieving one of the goals of TQM: continuous process improvement.

References

Albuali, M. (2021). Effective Strategies for Managing Communication in a Project. International Journal of Applied Industrial Engineering (IJAIE), 8(1), 1-6. https://doi.org/10.4018/IJAIE.20210101.oa1

Goetsch, D. L. & Davis, S. B. (2021). Quality management for organizational excellence: Introduction to total quality (9^th ed.). Pearson.

Stuit, M. & Wortmann, H. (2012). Discovery and analysis of e-mail-driven business processes. Information Systems, 37(2), p. 142-168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2011.09.008