Why is it important to communicate successfully between teams? Well, this may seem like a silly question with an obvious answer. It’s not! The tools we use to communicate nowadays are so complex yet seamless we can’t remember how we ever coped without them. Without instant messaging, getting any questions answered would take twice as long. Without video calls, meetings would have to be scheduled around everyone’s availability to travel and meet, again, taking heaps of time out of our already busy days.
Back in 2004 the main way people communicated between teams was emails, face to face conversations, or phone calls, there was no Facebook Messenger, that was founded 7 years later in 2011, all thought Skype was founded 2003 I’m guessing you hadn’t heard of it by then! Slack was founded in 2009 and Asana was founded in 2008. Starting to get the picture? Before 2004 the way people communicated was very limited. But it’s not 2004 it’s 2017. (According to Marty Mcfly and Doc Brown we should already be driving flying cars, wearing clothes that dry themselves and eating hydrated pizzas!).
There are now so many ways of communicating were spoilt for choice! But it is still just as important to communicate successfully between teams in 2017 than it was in 2004. Imagine if when you had to ask a colleague to clarify something it took you 3 phone calls and 2 emails back and forth. The beauty of tools like Slack is that you can message a colleague the other side of the world instantly and receive a reply instantly. I think that’s more impressive than clothes that dry themselves and eating hydrated pizzas (maybe not flying cars, that’s cool!).