First of all, for wok-wise, if the products and team ownerships are defined right, there should not be a lot and frequent communication outside teams for collaboration and handover of work. Most of the work can be handled within the team. The team should also have most of the expertise of what they do.
To promote a team culture with high transparency and high visibility, it should be encouraged that most of the communication be made to all team members, including detailed development work. There should be some asynchronous communication place for the whole team, such as slack channels for the team. The organization should break down the communication layers. Communication should pass as few layers as possible to reach the staff employees. Better, organization shouldn’t have that many layers as well.
Direct messages between two team members should be limited to only when the things they discuss are private. Having the communication content available to the whole team, more team members would be aware of what is going on within the team, not only limited to the things they are working on.
Direct message or point to point communication should be avoided to increase knowledge sharing and efficiency within the team. The traditional way of communication involves a lot of point to point communication, such as Product Owner gives some work to the team by talking to the squad lead only, explaining the work and background information. then squad lead assigns the work to a team member, repeating the explanation of the work and passes along the information to that team member. It is more efficient if this communication is done during a user story grooming meeting or team standup meeting. If it is some repeated work or straightforward task, it is better to mention that in the team slack channel instead of only to a single person.
Communicate publicly reduce bottleneck to wait on a single person . If anyone wants to ask a question, then ask to the whole team on a slack channel. Then anybody can chime in instead of having to ask one person through direct message, then another. Even though this might distract more people, but the benefit is that other people may also have the same question, then they will be able to know the answer as well.
People may worry about over communicating, such as not everyone in the channel is interested in the conversation. DM may seem better. But over communicate is better than under communicate. Let team members decide for themselves. If they are not interested, they can ignore that thread of conversation. Making the information available to other people is better then having the conversation privately. Here I want to mention as an etiquette using slack or other tools, always try to use a thread to reply a message, unless you want everyone’s attention on a certain answer. Directly replying other people’s message with another message is a spam.
Outside team communications, if it is any general sharing of knowledge, it is better to use channels related to specific topic. Then any team member can feel free to join the channel. Broadcast is better than passing the information through many layers of people.
Today’s world, email is probably the least preferred communication method. People should be encouraged to use other available methods if possible. The only time email is better is sometimes meetings are arranged unnecessarily when communication could be done via a simple email.
People that schedule meetings should be very conscious about using people’s time. Any meeting is an interruption to developer’s regular work. Meeting invite should be available to anyone interested. However, anyone in the meeting should feel free to leave the meeting if they feel it is not a good use of their time and their presence is not needed in the meeting.
Slack or other team communication applications are not good for back and forth discussion. If that happens during any discussion, a quick call will be more efficient. Verbal discussion will be much better than messages.
No matter what, it is all up to each individual team. What works best and what type of communication they feel most comfortable with, is the best way to communicate for them.
Digital Transformation Journey 