possibility to reduce communication effort

Dear community, today a topic that affects me every day: Communication effort.

First of all, communication between systems isn’t really meant but communication between people. Maybe you have to say that first in a community of technology experts 😉

I once learned that a person cannot “not communicate” – it’s simply impossible. Even if you don’t actively communicate (for example by speaking), communication remains passive (posture, facial expressions and more).

Active communication costs time. Time that isn’t always available. So you want to communicate effectively, especially at work. That’s why I’m constantly looking for ways to improve my communication. And today I would like to share and discuss one experience I made.

I’ve been working with Confluence for a while. As Wikipedia says “Confluence is a popular web-based corporate wiki (collaboration software)[..]“. That is absolutely true. You can create pages, you have different options for designing them, you can link pages, build structures and much more. Working with Confluence is quick and easy.

The big advantage are the collaboration functions. For example, you can quickly search through the whole content. If you use meta tags on your pages, this is even easier.

You can also recommend a page to colleagues or invite them to collaborate on this page. I find exactly this function very good! Here’s the reason why.

I get a lot of emails every day. Often it’s about questions. The senders therefore want me to reply as quickly as possible. Now it can happen that some questions are repeated – from different people and at different times. Or I can only give part of the answer. Instead of writing an email reply and starting a long email thread, you can create a page in Confluence and share this page with the sender. You can also invite other people to work on this page. This has some advantages because information…

1. is stored centrally
2. can be found by anyone
3. can be edited by anyone (correcting, expanding and more)
4. can be shared with others
5. is included in automatic backups
6. is included in a structure (context)
7. can be converted to different formats (ok, Word is not a good idea)
8. gets a change history
9. <your advantage>

Certainly this is not the solution to answer every email. I still answer most emails with an email. Hard to say this 🙁 But with some topics it’s really worth it. At the moment I’m also trying to use less Microsoft Office products and more Confluence pages for some topics. Concepts and documentation are typical examples. Among other things, arc42 is available as Confluence pages.

By the way, there should be other good products in this area besides Confluence. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet seen anything else in this depth compared to Confluence. Perhaps some of the readers want to share their experiences? It would be interesting to know if there is a strong open source solution.

By the way: You can use the SAP Community portal in a similar way. Information that is not a company secret and that you want to share with colleagues can also be posted via blog. Perhaps a programming example? Some tutorials? You have to decide that on a case-by-case basis and certainly coordinate it with your company. In any case, the benefits for everyone are very great 🙂

Best regards, thanks for reading and please stay healthy

Michael