Agile communication management
Agile communication management
Effective communication
Effective communication is a cornerstone of agile. Communication is the act of transferring information among various parties. Communications management is a knowledge and skill area of agile that highlights this importance. PMI has several definitions regarding communications management and agile builds on top of these to add its own perspective: 1) Communications Planning: Determining the information and communication needs of the projects stakeholders 2) Information Distribution: Making needed information available to project stakeholders in a timely manner, 3) Performance Reporting: Collecting and distributing performance information. This includes status reporting, progress measurement, and forecasting, and 4) Managing Stakeholders: Managing communications to satisfy the requirements and resolve issues with project stakeholders. From an agile perspective: communication among the team is built into the process and facilitated through collocation, information radiators, daily stand-up meetings, retrospectives etc.; Although it is hoped that the product owner, customer, and user can be heavily involved with the project and also use these communication techniques, a plan for conveying information to stakeholders may be needed if this is not the case. [Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game – 2nd Edition. Alistair Cockburn.]
Documentation
Agile values working software more than comprehensive documentation but this doesn’t mean no documentation at all. Documentation should be written just in time and just enough.
Delivering comprehensive documentation will not deliver business value without working software. Historically, in software development, it’s been a priority to exhaustively document everything: requirements, design, test suites, correct usage, and so on. But that’s expensive; so expensive that often the software itself suffers from the effort devoted to documentation. So we don’t write documentation just because; we write documentation rather we do it when it has value and is required.
Feedback techniques for product
(e.g., prototyping, simulation, demonstrations, evaluations)
There are several feedback techniques – techniques that facilitate constructive criticism to improve product value and quality – built into the agile process. In the classic definition, feedback is a dynamic process where past information influences the behavior of the same process in the future. Agile feedback techniques include prototyping, simulation, demonstration, evaluations, pair programming, unit testing, continuous integration, daily stand-up meetings, sprint planning. Because agile prides itself on a transparent and collaborative environment, feedback is essentially ubiquitous. [Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great. Esther Derby, Diana Larsen, Ken Schwaber.]
Knowledge sharing
In agile, effective ‘knowledge sharing’ is a critical factor for success. It involves the near real time communication of key information among all team members and stakeholders. To promote knowledge sharing, agile uses standard practices built into its process, such as using generalized specialists/cross functional teams, self-organizing and self-disciplined teams, collocation, daily stand-up meetings, iteration/sprint planning, release planning, pair programming and pair rotation, project retrospectives/reflection, and on-site customer support. And, of course, the sixth principle of Agile is » The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. » In this sense, Agile prefers and encourages collocation for all stakeholders and team members for the simple fact that face-to-face conversation is the best method of communication and, in turn, effective knowledge sharing. [Becoming Agile:… in an imperfect world. Greg Smith, Ahmed Sidky.]
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