Lack of consensus among team members
Project Smells — Bad Communication (1)
I’ve decided to write some blog posts about Project Smells. Projects also have it’s own bad practices and sometimes they smells too.
I’m going to start with Bad Communication, particularly, consensus among the team members. In my -not so long- experience, the most difficult tasks I had to tackle were interact properly with team members and stakeholders, communicating ideas clearly, and synchronize team members so they can all be in the same page.
— But I thought that you’ve said… — But he told me that… — But I understood…
If one of those situations sounds familiar, definitely something’s smelling in the project.
IMHO, effectives Daily Stand-Up Meetings are a good medicine to avoid those situations. However, Stand-Ups easily turns into a frustrating situation when team members can’t summarize they work in two minutes and communicate their “1, 2, 3 status" properly.
As a Project Manager, one simple practice I often use in these situations is to sum up all the decisions, action items and important events/impediments/news just before ending the meeting. I also encourage team members to repeat shortly and clearly which are his/her next steps… just to be sure that everyone is on the same page.
Last tip: Do you think today meeting was useless, or the team was distracted? Suggest to each one of the team members to repeat the next steps of the person next to him.
What other practices do you use to improve team’s consensus?
