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Communication is the Key to Success

In the tech era we’re living in today, you’ll find that most high-tech companies have a geographically distributed team and that most of the time they are also culturally diversified. That’s certainly the case here at SailPoint. For example, the team I’m a part of – our connectivity engineering team – is based in Pune, India. We are required to work with multiple remote teams across different time zones, and face to face conversation is not always possible. That can present a real challenge when working to ensure the appropriate level of cross-team communication for development and handling support work. To be effective and efficient in what we do every day, communication plays a very vital role.

One Team

Our connectivity team caters to multiple products, which can make collaboration difficult. On our team, we follow an agile process for development from the user story, to the grooming phase, to delivery.

Our Product Management team helps in coordination. This is done through our stand-up meetings, scrum of scrums, and weekly sync up meetings that are set to discuss, review the status and mitigate risk if any. We use an internal collaboration site to help track action items and milestones.

Similarly for customer issues, our team communicates with multiple customers across the globe. That’s where the Customer Success Manager comes in and the support team helps the connectivity team to set the context and criticality of the issue.

If required, the connectivity team joins the web-ex call with the customer to speed-up the resolution of the issue. When used in a holistic way, productivity tools like Jira, messaging apps, and conferencing tools are used for communication.

Effective team communication enables team members to keep up with the changes as information is shared efficiently. Even if the teams are at different locations, clear communication helps to keep teams in sync.

The Benefits of Transparent Communication

An effective communication strategy brings together people from different teams so they can share their innovative ideas and creates good rapport within cross teams over the globe. The leadership team plays a very important role in establishing the best practices/ground rules to bring teams together.

Further, transparent communication across different verticals helps set clear expectations, which allows us to deliver effectively on our commitments, i.e. Integrity, which is one of our core values. In the end, the outcome is a win-win situation for both employees and the organization.


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