Question

As the team I am on works to formalize and establish more development practices, I find that communication seems to fail at the following points:

1. During an informal conversation about a project a brain spark moment becomes a new feature/requirement. These “add-ons” seem to fail through the cracks or the detail become fuzzy after some time has passed.

2. In meetings where objectives or tasks aren’t clearly delegated, the members involved in the meeting have different accounts of what was actually discussed.

3. As a team we are constantly challenged(more so now that we actually are aspiring to write them) to generate quality specs and technical documents that detail exactly what features need to be in projects.

My question is: What are some suggestions and approaches to addressing these communication bottlenecks and inefficiencies? No programmer likes writing documentation but there hopefully is a way that we can centralize understanding and keep that information more visible and available during the life-cycle of a project…

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

Stick to the agenda. Stay on target. When things begin to veer off course, either schedule another meeting or take it to email after the meeting.

End each meeting with action items – a written list of who’s going to do what and when it’s expected. Yes, this means someone needs to write/type something during the meeting.

If documentation is becoming important and needed, then I strongly suggest you come up with simple standards and then stick to them.

Wiki. Wiki. Wiki. All “tribal knowledge” information useful for the team needs to go into a wiki. How to set up dev environments, common debugging tips, etc etc.