(^86) 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know
Introduce a More Agile Communication System
Introduce a More Agile Communication System
Brian Sam-Bodden
Scottsdale, Arizona, U.S.
MoST RETRoSPECTIvES oF FAIlED PRojECTS place a great deal of blame
on communication breakdowns between software project managers, team
members, and stakeholders. Project managers are taught to mitigate commu-
nication breakdowns between team members, and provide constant, effective
communication. The weight of this responsibility sometimes leads project
managers to overreact. They blur the line between essential, concrete commu-
nications and those where the content‐to‐noise ratio actually harms project
progress instead of helping it.
To solve this problem, many software development endeavors are moving
toward a more flexible, agile process. The key to agile methodologies is timely
communication loops that enable agile teams to respond effectively to unfore-
seen changes, and quickly reassess and reprioritize project features.
How do agile project managers keep communications limited to the essen-
tials? They promote the daily “15-minute stand‐up” meeting. It entails devel-
opers describing what they’ve accomplished since the last standup, what
they’re planning to accomplish “today,” and any impediments they foresee in
reaching their goals. The negative risk of a stand‐up meeting is that it may
rely solely on the precision of each developer’s self-assessment. The solution?
To make stand‐up meetings more effective, integrate a task management tool
that can show the output of a feature’s tests. A tool does not lie about the state
of a project’s codebase, and testing results are a valuable addition to developer
self-assessment. Presenting report data correlating a feature to a set of tests it
passed gives a more accurate representation of the state of the feature.
For example, results from a continuous integration tool can paint an objec-
tive picture of progress. This reduces the stand‐up meeting communication to
the essentials: reporting of impediments (hopefully, already caught by the task
management tool) and unforeseen developments due to edge cases, integration