Increasing Internal Communication

After the vacation I've been absolutely on fire at work! Seems that everything I do or try just goes pretty much as well or better than I had expected.

I can't remember exactly where I heard the term, but I got interested in Coding Dojo. We have suffered from teams being in silos and I've been thinking about possible activities to gather developers from across the teams. So I decided to arrange a Dojo!

Coding Dojo is a sort of workshop where everyone participates. There's a driver and a copilot (like in pair programming) and audience. Every five minutes (or any other agreed interval) people change places. Copilot becomes driver, driver goes to audience and someone from the audience becomes the new copilot. There ought to be one sensei also, but we didn't have one.

The subject for the first ever Coding Dojo was Async. No-one knew the subject that well and the group was able to successfully implement a small demo program. One improvement suggestion was that a bit better preparation would have saved a couple of minutes from the start. Point taken, inspect and adapt. ;)

I'm not a big fan of email, since people tend to ignore those messages. Or at least it is very hard to know if your message has been received and understood. I wanted to create a blog. First blog post could be a short report about how the Coding Dojo went by one the participants. It would be nice to get a developers perspective on this.

Third form of internal communication that I've tried this week was video. In a multi site company where people are spread around the globe, it's not possible to get everyone into a meeting room and just give a short training. And as I already mentioned, I don't have too much faith in people reading their emails.

I tried something new. I made a short PowerPoint presentation and uploaded it into our intranet. Then I started recording and talked through my presentation. It took less than ten minutes. After finishing the video and uploading it to the intranet I sent an email with links to both the slides and the video. I can warmly recommend this approach; the feedback was very positive. Of course, if it is an option, stick with the face to face conversation.

This video by Henrik Kniberg about Agile Product Ownership is simply the greatest educational video about any Agile subject that I have ever seen! It's been of great inspiration to me in the way of describing very complex concept in such a clarifying way. Thanks Henrik!