How can I standardize communication across the organization? What can I do to ensure that my employees are productive and efficient? What measures should I take to keep the communication channels between employees and customers open and transparent? Why are so many conflicts creeping in every now and then?

The solutions to these problems are in this book. Many organizations concentrate on honing technical skills and give little importance to communication. It is a fact that employees spend more time communicating than doing their respective core activities. In this scenario, not giving communication improvement due consideration is an opportunity wasted when it comes to getting the most out of them.

In today's competitive world, communication in business is no longer simply regarded as a humble "soft skill" that is an extension of the employee's primary skills. The importance of communication skills is such that it is perhaps now a skill that is valued more than, say, technical and management skills. Of course, technical expertise is essential, but with an increasingly educated workforce leaving university, there should be—in theory at least—a wealth of talent for organizations to choose from. Great communication skills can make an individual stand out, and can make them an invaluable member of a team.

It is certainly worthwhile putting in the time and effort to develop your team's skills; whether someone considers themselves a great communicator or they readily admit that communication is not their forte, there is always room to improve! Before you begin to develop your communication skills or help others develop theirs, it is essential to get a grounding in the basics of communication. Getting to the heart of the matter and understanding exactly what is going on every time you communicate is the first step to being a great communicator.

This book aims to help you out in running your own workshop with your teams, rather than bringing in a consultant like me, which is bound to be expensive. Also, you will have the flexibility of running it a number of times, anytime, and at locations of your choice. Through this book, you can readily fix your current communication structure and take measures to make communication between teams effective and reap the benefits of increased productivity.

When I go out on consulting assignments, I have witnessed firsthand that the right hand of an organization doesn't talk to the left hand. They are left hanging in between, and this results in a great amount of rework and a substantial increase in operating costs. In one case, a team was carrying out their work but never bothered to update anybody, nor did they have any system of logging what they did. This led to panicky stakeholders who had to chase up multiple times. Consequently, managers of this team did not have any clue whether job was done or not. They ended up acting as middlemen between the engineers on the floor and customers. This in turn resulted in a lot of wasted time in getting the update and passing it on to the customer. This is where I came in and introduced a system where the customers were able to obtain updates by themselves on a real-time basis by logging in to a portal. The onus was on the engineers to keep the status updates posted whenever there was something substantial to report. This solution ensured that customers got what they wanted, and the organization serving them could effectively manage expectations and communications through real-time reporting.

IT is becoming an increasingly large part of business life—although IT departments may have been secondary to an organization's operations and strategy in the past, in today's highly connected and digitized environment, they are the lifeblood of a business. IT departments certainly have more responsibility than they have ever had before. I have written this book keeping IT as the focus, although it can be used with any other non-IT teams as well. In fact, this book should be used by managers who head IT teams and who are ready to run their own workshops to improve communication—end to end.

I did not study communication in college. My academic background is in engineering and I currently work as a consultant. This book is an outcome of the education I have gained during my consulting experience, and from my cognizance of existing communication systems in organizations. During the course of the workshop, I will throw light on some relevant real-life examples. I am certain that you will be able to relate to a number of cases that I discuss, which will help you bring up the cases during your training sessions.