Conference Communication
I had been doing project communication all along when I was working in the IT industry.
This time, it happened to be in one of the conference call communication.
Background:
The conference call needs to be conducted at
• 11pm Singapore time, 4pm UK time and 8.30pm in Bangalore
• 1 conference involving 3 different time zone parties
Although the call was about the execution of some changes required to execute to implement a tweak in the production system.
However, in some instances, some attendees are waiting to pin you down in the call.
Recently, I supposed to open the conference bridge with the above details, one of the UK technical folk came to the call and left for other business.
This caused the bridge to be disconnected. I was not aware then.
Then the 3rd caller from Bangalore dialed in and was not able to get connected to the conference bridge. He was patient enough to wait for the moderator to dial and open the bridge.
Once the whole business execution was done, the conference call ended.
This Indian technical folk lodged a complaint to his superior and
mentioned that the moderator (Project Manager) was not around when the execution took place.
I was reprimanded seriously for not attending the call.
Lesson Learned:
Be more attentive to little details
Just render a reason why the call was not setup. Is it because of the reception or is the conference bridge got disconnected for some reasons.
Be more sensitive to different culture
Some culture respects punctuality. Some respects patient.
Thus a project manager needs to be fully armoured and sensitive in such cases.
Although the lessons learned above were simple and logical,
however, there were always times that you will miss during physical execution.
