Workplace and Communication

Encouraging communication

The difficulty in working with a large team is looking for ways to ensure efficient communication. These steps are valuable for setting up a communication structure:

• All project members should sit as close together as possible without crowding each other.
• The retrospectives performed after each iteration and release cycle serve as a forum for direct communication. Typically, we will find that optimizing space and improving direct communication for the daily work will be a regular topic until it is resolved.
• Regularly scheduled meetings for all project members are essential. Such meetings are primarily a mode of information transfer. Typically, there are too many people in these meetings for there to be any effective feedback or extensive discussions, but they work well for one-directional information transfer. Therefore, every project member should be able to contribute—in the form of a lecture about a specific topic, for example. It is a good idea to announce the contents of the contributions in advance.
• Provide a wiki on the intranet, not only as a means for documentation but also for communication.

Note: The philosophy of a wiki is to allow all kinds of discussion on the Web. Everybody has the right to make any changes to the website. This is possible through editable HTML pages. The wiki web has collective ownership, so everybody has the same responsibility for the contents. This helps to establish a community of trust. Furthermore, no deep knowledge of HTML is required to contribute to the wiki web. We can even contribute by writing plain text. If the wiki web is also used to document the project, we can be sure that this will always be a good source of project documentation.

• Establish different email distribution lists that allow team members to address everyone involved in the project, as well as specific groups of people.