Personal Communication and Decision Making

Individuals and interactions. Customer collaboration. I find it really hard to do that without meeting the other person. And if at all possible I prefer meeting them one on one. Or if that is not possible, I usually call using phone or voip. Why? Because it is so much more efficient than writing emails! ..or instant messages or anything else in writing.

I use such tools as JIRA, Lync and Flowdock quite a lot during my days. They are all great for asynchronous communication. And so is this blog post. But getting feedback for anything is a bit too slow to be really agile. Maybe one of the most frustrating features in instant messaging clients is to see that the other person is writing. Then you look at that and wait. If the other person has lot to say, you wait for a long time. But if you go and just have a quick chat it will all be done in no time. Simple and you get to do some nice human interaction also. I count it as a plus!

Well, you cannot always win. Sometimes the face to face conversations may not be pleasant. Sometimes you and the other person just disagree and there might be no getting past it. Or you need to give the other person some feedback that is not so easy to swallow. During those times I suggest just to focus on the facts. Don't get angry or frustrated, just deliver your message. Then you might want to let the other person to cool down before attempting anything mentally challenging. Because frustration simply blocks down our ability to think clearly.

Another interesting topic is the decision making. If I haven't totally misunderstood things, it's actually rather central topic in Agile. Empowering teams gives the teams (and individuals working there) power to make decisions. And thinking about it with some common sense, it does seem wise to do the decisions where the best knowledge is: in the teams. In Scrum the role of the Scrum Master is to remove impediments. A pending decision is an impediment. It's better to make a decision and move on than to waste time in pondering. So, Scrum Master can help facilitate decision making in order to keep team moving.

And I think the same principle applies when going "up in the food chain". Management should provide people with decisions. That's their job. Creating a better working environment through making decisions. Or empowering other people to make those decisions. But that's already a valid decision (and often a very good one.)

Finally I'd like to share this interesting link. Cult of Done. So simple yet so powerful! Starting things is easy. Anyone can do that. But what really counts is getting things Done! Finish starting and start finishing. Have working software as your only metric of progress. Done is the engine of more!