A lot of people say they want open and honest communication – a necessity for smooth business operations – but don’t act like it. Agile requires a huge amount of communication to be successful, both from team members and projects. Also a shout out to one of our Facebook fans, Mariel.
Full Transcript
Hey everyone. I’m Robert Dempsey, CEO and founder of Atlantic Dominion Solutions.
And before I get started, I want to give a shout out to Mariel, one of our fans on Facebook, made some comments about, she saw I was wearing a shirt and just wondering if I was indeed, when I’m doing these, wearing shorts. And I can say, yep, absolutely. And if you thought my previous coffee cup was big, check this one out. Basically, it’s like the biggest one I could find at 7-11 a number of years ago. There’s one that’s like a barrel, but I’m not going to go that far, just yet. I still get some sleep at night.
But anyway, back to the subject at hand. And what I want to talk about today is the importance of open and honest communication. And as hokey as that might sound to a lot of people, I find that communication is, a lot of the times, a root cause of trouble in a lot of companies.
And there could be a lot of reasons for that. I mean, it could be trust, basically people don’t trust other people with information or they think things like, well we have to keep all our financials secret or whatever, even to our employees. I mean, God only knows. But there’s a ton of reasons for that.
But either way, Agile is really heavy on communication, communication both between people, i.e. the team like the project manager, the team, the product owner or client, end users, etc., everyone needs to be in continuous communication to really make things work.
But then you also have communication from the project itself, i.e. when we ‘re doing the work. Is our project a so called “information radiator” and giving us the information that we need? You know, is it communicating to us what we need to continue to make good decisions?
And I’ve also seen that, while a lot of people will tout that they are very open to a lot of communication, they really aren’t. And you can tell this through the way that they act, maybe they’re just too busy all the time to ever really sit down and talk with somebody even though they have this so called open door policy.
So, you know, I would suggest if you are one of these extremely busy people like myself, you know, to have something like office hours where you say from, you know, X to Y time, I will be available to answer questions.
I know Jason Fried of 37Signals just started doing this, so that’s fantastic, good for him. And clients will do that too, so that the team can basically get to them at certain points.
So, communication, don’t just speak it. Don’t just say you have it, but actually get out there and do it.
So, thanks for your time and I look forward to your comments and thoughts about how you feel about communication or the lack thereof.
Thanks!
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