Why Communication Tools Are Important for Development Teams
Development teams live and die on communication. When everything goes right, engineers get to focus on their work and reach their deadlines without a problem. If team communication isn’t where it needs to be, you end up with issues that range from minor setbacks to project-ending problems. Approximately 86 percent of employees and executives can point to instances where poor quality communication has lead to some type of failure.
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Symptoms of Communication Problems
In your eyes, communication might seem great. When the development teams get together over lunch, they give the impression that they have excellent communication skills in place. Once they’re back with their own teams, these symptoms tell another tale. While not always only attributable to poor communication, asking if there is an underlying issue is a good first step.
- Missed deadlines and long lasting blockers: Development projects go off-track for many reasons, but poor communication often has a hand in this situation. Engineers get stuck sitting around and waiting for answers or for another person to finish their part of the work. Poor communication visibility makes it difficult for the team to know which issues are holding up development and what they need to do to get back on track.
- Long resolution times for emergent issues: The team may not know who they should contact for answers or to resolve project roadblocks. If they don’t know the right people to contact, the engineers end up spending their valuable time playing phone tag. Depending on staff availability, this could tie them up for hours or days as they bounce around from person to person.
- Cultural Difficulty Between Teams: When the development team interacts with other teams in your organization, do they share a similar communication culture? Some teams encourage reaching out and proactively messaging other employees whenever they need to ask questions or spread relevant information around. Other teams may have a culture where they try to resolve issues themselves before they bring it to another person or team. This happens even if the issue can’t be resolved without the help of someone else.
Types of Development Team Communication Tools
You can address many development team communication problems with the right tools. While you ultimately need a way to build strong communication within the company culture itself, using solutions that work for your needs and empower team members provides the necessary foundation.
The expectations of development teams may be different than other teams in your organization. Engineers work best in a state that they call “the flow,” which means that they encounter few distractions that take them away from their work and low-latency communication. The communication tools you choose should support this environment for the team.
Email gets a bad rap at times, since critical messages and documents like to get lost in the depths of someone’s inbox when they’re on vacation or have left the company. However, it often makes the most sense when you know that the person won’t receive the message for a few hours, whether they’re in another time zone or are simply trapped in a never-ending meeting. Emails also work well if you need an answer to a complex question, as you can save the response for future reference.
Slack, Hipchat and Other Instant Messengers
These communication tools provide the visibility that’s critical for distributed teams. When you have engineers and other staff halfway around the world from each other, it’s difficult to just visit someone’s office to ask a quick question.
Slack and similar tools offer a chat room for the entire team. Members can stay on top of communication and quickly answer anything that comes up during the workday. You don’t need to have a remote team to take advantage of instant messenger solutions. An engineer might not want to leave their desk for fear of interrupting the flow. They won’t need to when everyone on the team is sitting in a shared chat room and low-latency communication is available.
Video Conferencing and Google Hangouts
Sometimes verbal communication is key for the team as they work their way through the development process. While they have the option of picking up the phone, a better option is video conferencing.
You can promote an in-office style culture among remote teams by setting up a persistent Google Hangouts video call or with frequent web conferencing. Everyone can talk as though they were sitting across from one another at a meeting table, facilitating important discussions.
On-Call Directory
You can avoid many communication disasters simply by making it clear who needs to be contacted and when. If a critical system goes down and the first thing you hear about it comes from an end user, your first instinct might be to panic and call someone in a leadership position.
However, once the VP of Engineering gets alerted, they simply go and reach out to the person capable of fixing the problem. A lot of time and frustration gets saved when you have clarity in the chain of command in these types of situations.
Pager Duty
Pager Duty is a solution that automates the on-call workflow for you. You can create on-call schedules for your teams and develop workflows to account for common issues. For example, if an outage occurs and your development team reaches out to the on-call technician, Pager Duty will call and text that person until they get a response. The application automatically escalates to the next person in line if the first technician fails to answer.
Are you worried that your development team has communication problems? Download our checklists to find out whether you would benefit from implementing new tools to facilitate team collaboration.
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