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Soft Skills: Communicate on Another Level

Communicate on Another Level

Over the years I've dedicated a lot of energy into being able to communicate and understand Project Managers, Product Owners, Programmers with various skill levels and specializations, and APIs. However, that list doesn't include anyone with a broader level of concerns. The past couple years I've noticed I've had to communicate more and more with Executives, Business Owners, and Managers of various levels more and more as my responsibilities increase and my impact on projects become greater. So the goal is to learn to communicate with people who care less about the inside workings of the project at hand and more about funding, timeline, overall health, and impact of multiple projects.

Ground Level

I am a software engineer. I understand how code works and how to take an end goal and break it down into smaller tasks for success including the fine intricate details. I can organize code and explain how code works with other sets of code or services for a project or even multiple projects, and I can write documentation for code too. Unfortunately that is not what is really important on the business level.

A Little More Management Scope

On the business level we move from code concerns to management and profitability concerns. End goals need to be broken down into milestones for tracking progress, and impact for time and resources and less about completing three tasks to get X feature completed. Dependency issues transform from inter-dependency between code to inter-dependency between teams, partnerships, and events. In a sense, its the same concerns but with people/team/resource/business components instead of code components. At this level reporting justifications for initiatives becomes critical to success.

Upper Management

A typical high level manager or C-Suit would never know first-hand what they could have saved in money and most likely isn't collecting metrics to find out an accurate ROI. They are trusting the reports of their subordinates. More importantly they need to understand the relationship of the metric of the report to the ROI. This is why time becomes the primary metric. Its easy and simple The faster its done equals the cheaper it is which means better ROI. Errors are a much better metric to track ROI for because alot of errors generally means alot of people are having terrible experiences. For clarity; we are not talking about engagement values. We are talking about the value of development speed vs quality. Is it justifiable to have higher quality development?
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