Communication and Media Richness Assurance in High-performance Projects

In Communication, the term media richness (or information richness) refers to the amount of information a medium is capable of transmitting per given time unit.

Abstract

With a plethora of available communication tools and often high degrees of freedom in their timing, choosing the right tool at the right time is non-trivial. Depending on the choice of tools and timing, results will vary from excellent through acceptable to undesired. However, as no universally successful recipe exists for ensuring positive outcomes, having a good understanding of the various communication options and their attributes will increase chances of making rational decisions accumulated and translating in turn into complex, fit-for-purpose solutions.

This article seeks to help project practitioners gain awareness of different communication tools and timing from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Disciplines covered are human nature, psychology, mathematics, linguistics and culture, with use of case studies and best practice. The diverse angles on the topic come together to bring a unified, in-depth understanding of media richness assurance aiding practitioners to achieve better results in their practical application in project implementations.

A key concept discussed in the article is Media Richness Theory (MRT), or Information Richness Theory. MRT describes how various communication media, such as face-to-face interaction and email correspondence, have different characteristics in terms of their information capacity and transfer rate, notable advantages and disadvantages and situation-based use cases.

Based on MRT, three case studies will be discussed to analyse chosen tools and methods in relation to project outcomes. Conclusions from the case studies will guide the final article recommendations.

Introduction

Organisations rely on communication to successfully complete tasks (typically organised in projects) and fulfil purposes. Since success is typically measured on a linear scale, any overall project success could be considered the sum of a series of intermediary successes. Project purpose fulfilment thus quite simply relies on good stakeholder communication on a continuous basis throughout the entire project lifecycle.

What separates standard projects from high-performing projects is that in the latter communication effectiveness becomes vital not only regarding accuracy but also for speed. In other words, communication needs to happen both precisely and quickly, allowing superb utilisation of project resources to create outstanding project results.

Given the critical role of communication in high-performance projects, the question is ‘how does one go about designing and executing this complex project system of communication?’. As Daft and Lengel universally put it, "How do organizations perform this miracle?"

Human Nature

To truly understand later developments and higher-abstraction processes and terminology, one must journey back to the basics at the source and core meanings of the topic: Human beings are born with five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. These senses are designed not only for survival (securing life necessities) but also to enable us to communicate with our surroundings to yield better results in numerous respects. In essence, our choice of senses can be considered a toolbox that we make use of in various ways in order to carry out tasks and fulfil purposes. The way in which we relate to and make use of this toolbox sees us entering the domain of psychology: from a number of available options we make a given decision that employs one or more senses and then subsequently take appropriate action. These thought processes started out in history among primates as survival-prioritised ('there is food straight ahead, so I will move in that direction in order to get and eat it'), but have through time evolved substantially to highly complex, human decision-making patterns ('there is food straight ahead, but information tells me there is better food a little further on, so I will go there instead to eat). As evident in both scenarios, human biology is coupled with psychology through decision-making. In the latter, however, richer communication is present resulting in greater overall benefit.

Organisational Psychology

Organisations formed by coalitions of human beings have existed for several thousand years, yielding tremendous benefits on a grand scale. For example, the ancient Greek and Romans erected monumental structures which would have never been possible without cooperation through communication.

Colosseum, Rome: an example of a monumental structure crafted in early times (70-80 A.D.) through communication and collaboration

As with individual human psychological evolution, the psychology employed in traditional organisations evolved over time into a higher-complexity field as seen in modern organisations. Evolution in technology, human and material resources, infrastructure and health collectively caused an explosion in size and resolution of the overall decision-making landscape. There are now many times more key decision-makers in each organisation and an astronomical amount of organisation-level decisions made daily across the global business community. The refined effect of this on psychological factors is that decision-makers have access to an overwhelming amount of information and communication options yet continue to have the same mere five basic human senses. A way that modern organisations deal with this severely infavourable interface misalignment is to employ processes, policies and communication protocols to continually aid decision-making mechanisms. This places emphasis on organisation stakeholders to learn and appropriately interact with the organisational framework, but in return offers reduced levels of uncertainty achieved through somewhat guided focus. As Jacobsen and Thorsvik put it, "organisations are selective in their search for information and shield themselves against different types of information".

Information Media

In today's digital world an endless array of communication media exists for people to utilise. This immediately poses a threat to both efficiency and effectiveness, since communication is a continuous process and people therefore potentially could invest huge amounts of resources in communication with only an acceptable (or even little) amount of gain. Complimentarily, if communication media are used appropriately this vast selection of tools some of which could be considered extremely powerful could mean historically unprecedented opportunities for achieving world-leading project results.

The list below comprises some key communication media, categorised broadly based on their information/data transfer capabilities (quality of the data stream, categorised by fidelity and measured in bits per second; bps).

Fidelity	Medium	Timing	Transfer rate (typical) - primary data	Transfer rate (typical) - secondary data	Primary data type	Secondary data type(s)	Maximum senses engaged	Conversation party size (typical)
High	Face-to-face conversation	Synchronous	9,216,000,000	99,500,000,000+(limited to 1080p quality)	Audio	Video	5	2-4
	Video conferencing	Synchronous	128,000	1,977,000	Audio	Video	2	4-15
Medium	Telephone calling	Synchronous	12,200 (3G connection)	-	Audio	-	1	2
	Audio conferencing	Synchronous	128,000	-	Audio	-	1	4-15
	Internet messaging/chat	Asynchronous	1 (based on 4 characters typed per second)	500,000 (min. recommended rate for most demanding medium: video)	Text	Mixed media	2	2-4
	Email correspondence	Asynchronous	1 (based on 4 characters typed per second)	500,000 (min. recommended rate for most demanding medium: video)	Text	Mixed media	2	2-5
Low	Multimedia messaging (MMS)	Asynchronous	1 (based on 4 characters typed per second)	12,200 (3G connection)	Text	Mixed media	2	2
	Text messaging (SMS)	Asynchronous	1 (based on 4 characters typed per second)	-	Text	-	1	2

Data Flow

As seen in the table, the 8 different communication media vary greatly in their characteristics. By looking at the various data transfer rates, it appears that certain communication media provide significantly more information per time unit than others (in this article classed as media 'richness'). Adding to the mix the limits for senses engaged, which indicate the resources at the communication recipient's availability, an overall conceptual picture starts to form about data flow:

1. There are vastly differing caps for different communication media on how much information is transmittable

2. Dependent on chosen media type, there is great disparity in employable reception points (senses engaged) to which information is receivable.

Worth noting about the above quantitative data analysis is that it is solely concerned with mathematics and the numerical aspect of data streams. Left out entirely of this picture are the sociological and design/implementation aspects of communication. Other resource theories/models go in depth with these areas, such as the 34 different hypotheses found in Deutsch's research paper on cooperation and competition and the cost-versus-efficiency model for determining the best group size in Casari and Tagliapietra's article Group Size in Social-ecological Systems.

Data Quality

Whereas data flow tells us how much information is mathematically possible to send/receive, data quality relates to the clarity of the transmitted message. This aspect is vital in truly understanding the advantages and pitfalls of various information media. A key measurable for assessing quality is Signal-to-noise ratio.

Looking into the meaning of the numeric transfer rates in the table data, each figure (denoting a pool of information) can be considered to contain two sub-components: signal and noise. The signal is what carries the key message from a communication sender to a communication recipient, whereas the noise covers any other signal that is considered irrelevant to the given conversation/communication transaction. This concept is applicable to both audio and visual media components.

Assuming that both signal and noise account for a low minimum of 10% of the data transfer rate for each medium, the larger data rates immediately transpire to have significantly more resolution in terms of both signal and noise information. Appropriate filtering in terms of blocking out noise would then allow a richer signal to be perceived. Luckily, both our highly-efficient visual and audio perception coupled with advanced brain processing allows just this. For audio, "auditory perception encompasses a sequence of feature extraction steps, with increasingly complex acoustic features extracted at each stage of neural processing"

The bottom-line result of increased available information and our biologically highly effective signal/noise processing is that richer media allow for a much cleaner communication output in terms of delivery of the intended message. Controversely, the more information we have to deal with, the higher the quality of the outcome. Naturally, this is only true as long as there is a reasonable proportion of signal in the data transmission; or, on the flipside, the noise fraction should not exceed certain thresholds. As an example, for face-to-face communication Singleton observes that "for communication to be judged as satisfactory, background levels need to be below about 50 dB(A) for a listener 2 m away...". Likewise, in terms of the speed of the conversation there are upper limitations defined by our biology. As pointed out by Levitin, "the processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second".

Historic Media Use

As seen, different communications media have different characteristics. To make best use of the strengths of each medium while steering clear of individual weaknesses, it may be beneficial to keep historic developments and root causes for the creation of different communication media in mind.

While the complete history of communication media spans more than 5000 years, and holds vast amounts of useful knowledge, focusing in on a few key developments may help provide enough resolution to the article topic. Below is a table of date-ordered technological advances and key associated benefits.

Year	Medium Introduced	Intended Benefit
3200 BC	Cuneiform writing	Communicate in writing
500 BC	Letter	Written conversation over distance
1849-1884	Telephone (landline)	Spoken conversation over distance
1936	Video conversation	Synchronous video conversation
1971	Internet Chat	Synchronous written conversation
1971	E-mail (electronic mail)	Freedom in written conversation over distance
1973	Telephone (mobile)	Freedom in spoken conversation over distance
1974	Audio conferencing	Audio conversation over the internet
1984	Video conferencing	Video conversation over the internet
1992	SMS / text message (Short Messaging Service)	Quickness of written conversation over distance

From the timing of developments in the data table, a few notable points can be deducted:

• Human being inter-communication as a concept is very matured
• Six out of the ten technological developments happened within 21 years, indicating both a strong desire and the technical capability to use multiple communication media.
• Recognisable common factors exist among the latter; intentions of developing faster, more convenient and richer media outputs

Case Studies

Having studied a selection of commonly used communication media, a look at how project communication in industry affects project success/failure classification may be interesting. In the following section three case studies are compared and contrasted in terms of their final delivery outcome and the impact in-project communication has had thereupon. The case studies have been selected based on shared project similarities and their varying degree of project communication success, ranging respectively from poor through adequate to good.

Dubai Aquarium

Dubai Aquarium, Dubai. The aquarium with glass-walled water tunnel is located inside the Dubai Mall; one of the World's largest The aquarium was opened in 2008 with the official position as the World's largest indoor aquarium (tank size: 51 x 20 x 11 metres). It also held shopping centres.

Key points: 2010 flooding of Dubai Mall: critically located and deadly risky structure = Poor design! Critical aspects: 11 million litre tank, ... Project communication: Failure (This section is unfinished and will be expanded)

http://blog.raynatours.com/10-interesting-facts-dubai-mall-aquarium/