Death by Emails & Spreadsheets: Leveraging Technology to Enhance Communication

Have you ever missed an important email? Do you spend substantial time digging up old emails or just wish you received fewer of them? Do you yearn for increased visibility to what your coworkers are working on? Would it be helpful to see who has planned time out of the office that might impact your deliverables? Have you tried to update project timelines and statuses in an Excel spreadsheet only to discover that it is locked by another user? Do you wish there were better ways for identifying and tracking ongoing data issues?

Just about everyone can answer yes to at least one of these!

In a world with increased globalization and remote work, challenges in effective communication and collaboration are on the rise. It has become even more important to solve these challenges, so they don't inhibit time spent on the "real work". With every crisis comes opportunity, and in this presentation, we will share our simple integrated solutions that have improved efficiency and visibility using existing available tools. We have observed increased process compliance because the solutions are so straightforward to implement and make the user's job easier.

This presentation will walk the audience through a series of demonstrations and case studies to provide real-world examples of applying simple integrated technology solutions to increase effective communication throughout a team or organization. These demonstrations include: (1) Data Issues Log, a simple solution for tracking and following up on data errors; (2) Project Workflow Tracker, an automated process workflow for programming and quality control that has increased team visibility to project status and reduced unnecessary emails and meetings; (3) Setting up Automated Reminders, a simple automation that allows robots to do the "boring stuff" for us; (4) To Do Boards, a case study leading to improved performance and resourcing; and 5) Out of Office Calendar, a shared calendar view for out of office time for all members of a team.

We will also show how each of the above solutions are integrated, despite each example solving a very different purpose, making implementation easy and users compliant.

Automation

Collaboration

Technology

Communication 

Effective Communication

Conference on Statistical Practice (CSP) 2023