Mike Lyons argues that face-to-face conversation is the most efficient way to convey information in development teams. He recommends keeping video on in remote meetings, accounting for cultural differences, and setting explicit team communication norms to avoid costly problems like distance from users.
Communication. What could possibly go wrong? I mean, you know, since the dawn of time humankind has struggled with this idea of communication. Sort of, you know, I say one thing and you hear another thing. I type one thing and you read a different thing. Man, communication is hard. It's just hard. No matter how we try to do it, it's difficult. But I want to remind us of the Agile Manifesto principle that comes to mind when we think of communication. REM the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face to face conversation. As agilists and on scrum teams, we believe face to face communication is the best form of communication. So for example, within our daily standups, our daily scrum, the best way to do that is physically together, co located together face to face standing up, sometimes called the daily stand up. Oftentimes people will work remotely or be distributed across a geographic region. Well, we highly recommend the video be on. When you're doing video calls or some sort of collaboration tool electronically have that video on, that face to face piece. I don't recommend this idea of, well, let's just email each other every day with like a status update kind of email. Now the written communication, written forms are very difficult and require a certain amount of persistence to make sure that we are reading and understanding what people say and then got to kind of reply all, you know, so everybody knows what everybody's happening. We want to avoid that. Additionally, consider culture and high context versus low context culture. Maybe you're on a large global, geographically distributed agile program. Well, context is important in cultures. In high context cultures like in Japan, face to face communication is critical, very important. Also a sense of hierarchy is important in those cultures, whereas in lower context culture, say sort of in the US or even in other areas like Germany or Spain, where low context cultures, where written communication like you know, think Twitter or texting or you know, these quick sort of pieces, those are, those are more, more accepted. But in, in all of this we believe that face to face communication is the best form of, of communication. We want it, but what we want to do is take into consideration each of these barriers to communication and then deal with them as appropriate for the team level. And it might be different on each team, it might be different on your team. What's key is to remember the cost, the cost of the organization. If we're four and five layers removed from the actual user of our products, for example, that sort of communication barrier can be, can be devastating for a business. Imagine if you release a product and nobody uses it because you're so far removed from the users who will ultimately use and purchase your product. Physical barriers to communication are also costly for organizations in the form of the technology and tooling needed to overcome the barrier. Take for example the global pandemic of 2020, where many people began to all of a sudden work remotely. Well, industries and organizations had to invest in technology platforms, technology tools to help to reduce communication barriers. We see it around us in the form of remote workers. Heck, entire industries have grown up in that rapidly to deal with the communication barrier costs and how to mitigate against that. And not only these costs, but consider that the longer we get into our product, the farther we get into our cycles, the more costly it is when we have to deal with the effects of poor communication. You want to get this right early. Establish your communication norms, have it in your team working agreements. How will we tear down communication barriers? How will we be forward thinking and bring that to the front of our thinking and how we're going to address these things? Doing that now will save us money later. Try to remember to go back to the Agile Manifesto principles and let's avoid any of this adding in complications to communication where we can.
