Accountable Communications™

Team Analytics' platform for Accountable Communications™ provides a secure, Web-based tool for recording clear commitments and tracking performance against those commitments as well as participants' responsiveness to communications between stakeholders about their delivery commitments. Accountable Communications™ also include secure, persistent, threaded online discussions as well a shared task list.

By virtually eliminating the effort wasted on nagging colleagues to report progress and deliver on commitments, Accountable Communications™ enable project managers and stakeholders to focus on driving the project forward with sufficient support from the team to insure success.

Do any of these problems sound familiar?

• Your resources say "Yeah, I can do that." to a task assignment, but it's a prediction -- not a commitment they take very seriously.
• During the course of a project or a business deal, you often find yourself diverting your attention from driving the project in order to “nag” colleagues to complete a commitment or provide information you've asked for.
• You waste a lot of cycles following up to be sure progress is being made.
• Your organization experiences difficulty operating with virtual teams composed of remote participants, especially in offshore teams where language and culture may interfere with clear communication.
• It's difficult to orient new team members to bring them up to speed on the most relevant conversations and decisions that have taken place up to that point in a project.
• Have you noticed how e-mail, which is inherently formless, has fragmented business communications over the past decade?
• There's an "energy leak" that continually drains focus and motivation from team members but is never adequately addressed.
• Your team members spend most of their time in meetings discussing the things they agree on while avoiding making difficult decisions.
• Instead of dealing with a sequence of unique problems, your team is dealing with the same damned problem over and over.
• How much time do you waste in a day dealing with spam -- i.e., e-mail from people butting into your business?
• Your organization continues to reward a vendor with more work even though its people are not responsive to your requests simply because nobody's keeping track of the vendor's response history.
• Your company has missed opportunities to avoid costs related to critical-path information that arrives late or falls between the cracks.
• You've felt the disappointment of missed schedules and frustrations due to communication problems and/or inadequate collaboration processes within your workgroup.
• Your company has continued to pursue an approach that's costly and inefficient because the real costs and the real impact of the inefficiencies are too squishy or too complex to measure.

You’ll appreciate the sensibility of Accountable Communications™ from Team Analytics Consulting.  It's a standards-based system that improves productivity and collaboration within a workgroup.  It eliminates the ambiguity inherent in e-mail communications, establishing appropriate structure and security to support purpose-driven, interactive, business transactions between colleagues on all your important projects.

Accountable Communications™ are Web-based transaction services that supplement freeform e-mail communications. 

Accountable Communications™ engage the following participants in managed communications:

• In-house staff members in multiple locations with Internet access
• Field staff members capable of receiving e-mail and accessing the Web
• External vendors you specify

These transactions are currently in beta test and development:

• Shared Task List -- Registered members can add tasks and assign them to themselves or other members. A task can be associated with a project or stand alone. The task's description is a rich-text field that can contain text, a Web page, one or more documents used in the task -- in fact, the content one can associate with a task is practically unlimited.
• Secure Message Thread™ -- Some "virtual conversations" are important enough and sensitive enough that e-mail just doesn't work. A Secure Message Thread™ enables members to start an online, managed conversation with a specified group of people that are notified by the system whenever a participant posts another message in the thread. Only members specified as participants in the Secure Message Thread™ can access the thread or even discover that it exists. This makes it possible for the conversation to persist over time without risking intrusion from unauthorized participants.
• Request for Commitment™ (Action Item) -- For work items requiring a more formal process of specifying the work and assigning responsibility, a member (the petitioner) can send another member (the respondent) a Request for Commitment to perform an Action Item. The person being asked for a response (the respondent) can make a counterproposal indicating what support or payment they want for accepting responsibility for the Action Item and delivering as agreed. Once the petitioner and respondent execute an agreement, the system sends reminder notifications to help each party fulfill their responsibilities and keeps track of their performance according to the agreement.
• Request for Commitment™ (Project Task) -- A Project Task is similar to an Action Item with the distinction that it's associated with a project.
• Request for Product Change (Change Request)
• Request for Service (Problem Report)
• Sense-Us™ -- real-time feedback in meetings indicating the degree of alignment among team members

The heart of Accountable Communications™ is a platform for structured interaction designed to facilitate specific requests for commitment, clarification, support and other services or information during the course of a project and to account for completions according to a schedule.  Workgroup members receive timely reminders as well as actionable feedback on their response times and success ratings in servicing accountable requests.  Over time, these metrics become reliable predictors of collaboration behavior by internal and external participants. 

You’ll never go back to unstructured e-mail for your most important project communications.

For more information on Accountable Communications™, please contact us!

More about the features and benefits of the Accountable Communications Platform™