Fixing Disparities

A widely discussed topic in managing Web projects is the disparity in personality
and subject matter expertise. All of us have, at one time or another, been party to
such personality differences within our fields.
The programmer often thinks in abstract but linear chunks of information, whereas
a designer might only focus on the visual and creative feel of a project. Marketing
departments have their own lingo, as do the financial folks. InWeb teams, you end
up with not only disparate points of view, but also differences in language use and
expression.
While ideally all people working on the Web would at some point be exposed
to effective communication skills (often referred to as soft skills in the corporate
world), the reality is that most people focus their energies on what pays the bills
and what interests them specifically, without a lot of encouragement to be more
integrated in their thinking and language. This is not a fault, but it does point to the
fact that no educational or professional standards have emerged just yet for those
of us in the field. As a result, most of what you pick up you learn by the bootstrap
method, from colleagues and friends, and on your own via books and Web sites.
As a result, effectively communicating across the subfields within the industry becomes
a significant challenge. When working on team-driven projects, this challenge
can surface into real problems.
A great project manager can solve this by effectively identifying roles, responsibilities,
and goals, and organizing the project in such a way that respects the diverse nature of individuals within a team, while also getting that team to work in tandem
toward a common, clear goal.