Solving Communication Problems

Goal: Solve communications issues threatening a multi-million dollar investment.

My Roles: Product designer, analyst, researcher, leader.

Impact: According to the project manager, I "saved the project" and its multimillion dollar investment.

StorageNet 6000 (StorageTek)

Situation

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Task

Actions

Results

This one involves no design. But it tells you something about how I go outside my job description when I have to.

A year before I started at StorageTek, the 15 different technical domains working on the product (a piece of hardware that would connect LANs to storage networks – had gone to different corners of the building and done their work, independently. “It’ll all come together in the GUI” was the assumption.

I was designing the GUI. And it was looking great.

But like the biblical Tower of Babel, in the intervening 18 months those teams had started speaking different languages. There was no common lexicon to bring all the different technical domains together.

So unless something drastic happened, my designs weren’t going to work. And either was the product.

et with the leaders and engineers of the 15 different technical domains and get everyone to agree on a common lexicon of concepts, so we could make them talk with each other through the user interface.

Solving this involved getting groups of busy engineers together during the only time everyone had available – lunch time – and hashing out the differences in definitions anjd semantics between the different technical domains in the product – some of which were very different to begin with, and hadn’t developed any mutual understanding in the previous year.

(Side note: the only food we could get catered for these meetings was pizza from a national chain. Which I had for lunch, 4-5 days a week, every week for six weeks).

And I led those meetings, 4-5 noon hours a week, for six weeks. And other side-meetings as time permitted.

And I gradually got everyone onto the same page – literally and figuratively. We figured out how to get all those technical domains to communicate.

There were two results from those six weeks of meertings:

Everyone was able to communicate. The project manager told me “You saved the project“.
And to this day, I can not eat pizza from that particular chain.

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