Bad Communication Habits (1 / 3)

1. "To many mind"

-Nobutada: Please forgive, too many mind.
-Nathan Algren: Too many mind?
-Nobutada: Hai. Mind the sword, mind the people watch, mind the enemy, too many mind... [pause] No mind.

[The Last Samurai (Wiki Quote Org.)]

The problem

Communication channels of software teams often starts to wildly swell, because of a poor management. This situation can throw down the cliff any development effort (in-house or product), because of the messy environment generated by it. The problem begins when every team member is able to talk with others inside and outside the team. This means that any stakeholder can talk to any team member and vice versa. You quickly end up with a situation like this (in terms of the amount of communication channels):

Unmanaged communication channels

The solution

You need to find a hub in every group. This is not a difficult task, if you look at Scrum role's definitions  you'll find that such hubs already were designed for us: they are the Scrum Master and the Product Owner. So, instead of having 28 communication channels (7 x 4), you end up with just one! 

Managed communication channels

Why does it happens?

Often in in-house development environments, and some not matured product companies, teams start working without a proper role definition. They instinctively know that each group have a leader but as time passed and problems starts to rise, roles and leadership vanished. Communication gets groggy because of everyone is talking at the same time to each other.

Users starts reporting the same issue twice or more. Two or more developers start working on the same bug without knowing it. No one has the “big picture” of the product / project, because everyone has a little piece of it.

Zooming in ...

To better illustrate the problem, we can inspect the following example: Imagine you are working on a Scrum team composed of 8 people. Your team needs to interact with three others: the Key stakeholders, and two production support teams (A and B); they have 4, 3, and 4 members respectively.

What will happen if all this people starts talking without a proper management? You end up with the following communication channels (from one group to another and withing each one):

Here is a graph to better explain the situation.

And, what about channels withing a group (Scrum team to Scrum team)?

We can not force people not to talk, and even if we could it's a very unhealthy thing to do. As you can see just between Scrum Team's members you could have up to 56 channels. These channels can create information islands. Again we have the answer on our face: Scrum Ceremonies (specially the daily Scrum). Those meetings allow knowledge sharing and avoid isolation and sub-groups.

One problem, when adopting Agile is that people thinks that is just another set of rules to follow and don't think about why the methodology suggest does kind of guidelines. Maybe if we show first the problems and then present the proposed solution they will be more willing to adopt the change.