from www.pdrap.org, an interesting article on teams, I agree... something must be done!

I wrote this about the practice of having development teams attend a weekly meeting where everyone talks about what they are working on, what problems they are having, etc.

I hate these kinds of meetings, because it's just about the worst way to exchange information.

To use a simple example, consider the telephone. It's a synchronous communication device - it requires both parties to be using it at the same time. Voice mail, an attempt to turn a synchronous communication method into an asynchronous one, is a nasty hack. Most information that is communicated through a telephone does not require synchronicity. That impedance mismatch causes an inefficiency that could be avoided though a more appropriate selection of communications device.

Likewise, the function of letting everyone know where everyone else is, coordinating schedules, and a weekly to-do, does not require synchronicity. If it does, then that suggests to me that the project manager (or technical lead) isn't doing their job. They are just organizing meetings and pushing the responsibility for their job down to an inappropriate level. When coordination is delegated to a level that is too low, then the possiblity of optimizing communication between subordinates is lost. The correct path for information has to be either discovered through trial-and-error (talk to teammates until you discover who is interested in what you have to say) or broadcasted to the entire team, wasting their time. This results in a situation where each team member has to individually select what information is important to them and which is not.

To bring this back to the synchronous/asynchronous concept mentioned before, that selection of information cannot be optimized in a team meeting, because of the synchronous and serial nature of the meetings. When the decision is made by the individual that the topic has no importance to them, there is no option to skip the topic. The uninteresting topic must be heard in its entirety before the next topic can be heard.

There is technology that can fix this problem, but I have seldom seen it used: NNTP. News servers have been with us a long time, and small team-oriented servers with a tightly focused set of newsgroups can eliminate this bottleneck by making the exchange of information asynchronous and non-linear.

I have mentioned these ideas at every place I have ever worked, but no manager I have worked for has taken them seriously. I think part of the problem is the conservativeness of project management, perhaps because some managers aren't technically astute and don't trust the tools that can help them. I think another reason might be that many managers don't think very much about team dynamics and how even very small inefficiencies in communication method can add up quickly when run through an exponential function of team size.

posted by Bryan at 7/10/2002 04:06:00 PM