Email, Email everywhere – But not the one that I need!

Email is the center of our worlds today. Everyday our inboxes are flooded with emails; work related emails, family related and those pesky junk mails. We end up spending a good portion of our daily lives over emails, managing, sorting and organizing them. Email has become the de facto standard for all our collaboration needs.

Most companies have setup elaborate collaboration tools and applications to handle the collaboration needs. But they have quickly realized that no one really uses them. Everyone always falls back on emails. The last mile of most business process is almost always achieved over emails.

Let’s observe a typical project management process of any company:

1. The Project Manager sends out an email to all team members with some design documents as attachments and requests their comments
2. The team members reply to the email with their comments
3. Some of the team members update the attachments with their comments and/or attach new documents to their emails as part of the conversation.
4. The Project Manager sends out more emails explaining and detailing the issues. A fierce conversation ensures!
5. At the end of it all, the Project Manager collates briefs from all email conversations, organizes the changes made to the attachments into one master document and updates the team members

Issues with the process:

1. Chaos and confusion as to who said what, when and to whom
2. Impossible to find out where is the latest version of which document
3. Tremendous loss of man hours and productivity on everyone's part to keep track of the process and its latest status
4. Cluttered up inboxes from the huge number of emails that went back and forth

Does this sound familiar? If so, what have you done to resolve them? If you have done something, then please share it with us. If you have done nothing, then why do accept it as-is?