The Pitfall of Email

Email is good, so good and damn good. It's one of the revolutionary inventions of the century changing the entire communication protocol in the world.

However, "email" has its affiliated side-effect/drawback. Misuse/abuse of email posts harm to communication especially in project management:

1. Printouts - In this Internet driven era, one cannot survive without an email account in business. But it is this undeniable necessity catalyzing one of the technology flops - "paperless office". Nowadays, people use email in almost every kind of business communication: memo, notice, announcement, meeting recap (minutes), requirements, negotiation records .......... with the capability of carbon copy to others in a click. The recipients (direct or indirect) have inevitably to "print" them out for reading, archive, filing or records.
2. Documentation by Emails - Formal training on software engineering emphasizes the importance of process and proper documentation. But this traditional view should be challenged by new generation of methodologies. Agile Software Development, Extreme Programming, Rapid application development (RAD) stress on the speed. Such emphasises may post misconception to programmers and developers. With the priority of "Speed", adhering to proper process and documentation practice are time-consuming (bureaucratic) and they simply ignore the documentation until the end of the project life-cycle. Emails then became their "information/documentation repository" and their email-boxes have become the pseudo file cabinets. (However, from my understanding, I find this is just an excuse for not doing it in most of the times).
   

I am not sure the situation of others, but based on my experience, the abuse of email in IT projects (as documentation repository for meeting recap, technical conclusion, software bug reports, and etc. during project execution stage) is getting bad over the past few years.

There is a simple test to verify the degree of email abuse in an IT project: ask any one of your project team-members about the latest technical discussion results during the last design meeting. His/her responses will tell you the severity:

• A - He/she gives you the answer verbally but no b/w records.
• B - He/she gives you the answer by referring to his/her email-box archived email.
• C - He/she gives you the answer by referring to the project document repository.
• D - He/she asks you to refer to the project document repository for the answer.

My current situation is 7:3 between "B" and "C". How about your projects?