No Tools between people
This post is part of 101 ideas for agile teams.
Context
Communication in your teams happens over tools:
- Testers and developers “talk” over the issue tracker
- product owner and team “communicate” over Jira (or something similar) — the product backlog
- team members “update” themselves by setting a status field on the task in an electronic tool
- a wiki “is used” to ramp up new team members
These ways of communication are slow because they are asynchronous. And they are error prone because a lot of misunderstandings happen in written communication.
Action
Whenever you have information to share, need information or want to discuss something, talk to the person or people needed directly, face-to-face.
Use tools that support communication, not tools replacing your face-to-face communication. Tools like whiteboards, pen&paper, visualization.
Use tools like wikis, issue trackers, electronic backlogs as an information storage, not a communication tool.
Direct communication with immediate feedback.
What you gain
You get better understanding because when talking face-to-face, you get immediate feedback about how well the presented information was understood and questions can be asked easily and directly.
You get better results because interacting directly with each other helps developing good ideas.
How to strengthen
Discuss with your team how you can make communication more direct, with more immediate feedback and how visualization can support the flow of information.
Risks
Face-to-face communication is fast, but we forget what we talked about quickly, too. Make sure that decisions and key points of a conversation are stored more permanently (visibly on a paper on a wall, wiki, …)
Please help me improve this idea by providing feedback.
More ideas at 101 ideas for agile teams
Many thanks to bbv Software Services for making this blog post possible.
