Don’t you love clichés? I am sure your immediate thought when you read the title of this post was “Yet another blog telling me I need to listen more”. You’re probably right about half of it, you probably do need to listen more. We all need to listen more. But this thought doesn’t deal with the art of listening; it deals with a completely different form of communication.
Have you ever gotten that email that just looked so long you decided that reading the first two lines would probably tell you everything you needed to know? Have you gotten the document that your stakeholder spent hours preparing, and you spend two minutes skimming over?
I have heard that listening is a dying art. I have attended multiple training sessions on active listening and training sessions designed to make me a better listener. Maybe it is time for us (I am including myself) to remember that reading is a form of communication as well.
Section 9.9 of the BABOK v2 deals with document analysis as a technique to gather requirements. Let us all remember that documents aren’t just the latest process flow or the user manual sitting on someone’s shelf - a document is also that unopened or opened but not really read email that is sitting in your inbox.
If your stakeholder explains something to you, and you don’t listen, then you’re not communicating. If your stakeholder sends you an email that you don’t read, then you’re still not communicating.