Maybe you live in a cubicle. You love your privacy, your
personal space, your segregation from the rest of the office. You
have it decorated how you want and its your home away from home.
You have email and instant messengers at your fingertips to communicate
with your co-workers. What a wonderful world will live in,
right? You get to do all your work, communicate with your team
and never have to leave the comfort of your private little “home”.
While this is all nice, it has a certain negative impact on your
team’s ability to communicate and effectivly solve problems in a timely
and cost-efficient manner. For those of you who have knowledge of
agile methodologies, XP in particular, you’re aware of the war
room. A war room is a large room where everybody on your team can
sit together, see eachother, quickly and easily talk to eachother, have
constant face to face communication and be a more effective team.
Face to face. That is the key idea here. Let me give you an example. Check out this blog post and its responses.
I can guarantee, with absolute certainty, that none of the
misunderstandings would have occurred, and this was have been a simple,
easy discussion had we all been in the same room and able to
communicate face to face. When I finished writing the post, I
re-read it to make sure I was communication my thoughts and purposes
effectivly, and was satisfied with what I had. Judging from a
couple of the initial responses, I certainly failed to communicate my
goals properly. Had I taken Jeffrey’s initial advice, not only
would this have not solved my problem effectively or achieved my
overall goal, it may very well add complexity to the system (in my
opinion) that doesn’t necessarily need to be there for that piece of
the code to serve its function properly. The same goes for Matt’s
comment. While its a fine way to create a private function to
handle the logic of equating the dates, it serves little purpose to the
overall goal I was trying to achieve.
Too many people think that emails, IM’s and blog posts with
responses are an effective way to communicate. While its
convenient, its certainly not as effective as face to face
communication. Facial expressions and the ability to interject
into a conversation can make all the difference in avoiding
miscommunication and misunderstandings.
Get out of your cube, walk over, and have face to face conversations
and ditch that internal IM and email crutch. Its a crutch that
will keep your communication efforts limping until you give it up.