Communication Leads to Great Collaboration
Communication was one of the most important skills for success at WGBH. WGBH is a very open company, where employees from one department will often communicate and work with employees in other departments. Fortunately, there are strong communication systems in place. The most important are digital collaborative spaces and communication platforms which are confluence, jira, and hipchat. Confluence is a private wiki, where employees can post new research notes, to do lists, diagrams, drafts of their work, or anything needed to share with the teams they work with. Jira is for the IT side of WGBH, where team members can open and resolve tickets related to IT issues. Hipchat is the instant messaging and video calling platform which includes a searchable directory of every employee at WGBH. Every employee, co-op, and intern is given an account to access these tools to communicate within the company. Finally, the most traditional method is e-mail.
In a typical day, I will log onto my e-mail to see if my boss has sent me daily or weekly goals along with logging into hipchat so I can be reached if anything is needed of me. I typically post my project progress and research notes on confluence, so if I have anything to add or edit that was where I would go throughout the day. In terms of company collaboration, many of my projects have had teams that include employees from departments outside of Digital, which is the department I have been interning at. These systems give teams at WGBH an easy way to keep in touch and keep up with project progress. These forms of communication reflect how WGBH functions as a company. People are very open to collaboration and often times at meetings we would be working on an idea and someone would mention that a friend of theirs in a different department has worked on something similar or has an idea that can help with the project we are meeting about. Then through these systems, we can easily get in touch with the person that could be interested and see if they want to provide insight. With good communication, there is strong collaboration.