Team members have all experienced delays when requesting an email, a returned phone call, or waiting for a meeting to be scheduled to get feedback.  While each item individually may appear to cause only minor delays, hundreds or even thousands of these exchanges accumulated over the life of a project can result in significant time delays.  Especially in context of a highly collaborative activity such as software development, where functional and technical questions arise and design decisions are made every few minutes, the lower the communication bandwidth, the greater the likelihood of misunderstandings, rework, and less than optimal decisions.  

When we talk about team, we mean the complete team – customer or user advocates, developers, testers, analysts, managers, coaches – anyone needed to deliver the product.  A at a minimum, everyone on the team should have available to them a common roadmap or storymap, a shared backlog, visible progress charts, build status indicators, demo projectors, and lots of whiteboards.  Ideally the team is located in a common workspace.

Common workspaces address the inherent inefficiencies of distributed personnel, separate and/or remote offices, or large campuses. These shared workspace or “war room” environments have been shown to facilitate much more effective team interaction, rapid feedback, and accelerated decision-making.  When a programmer has a technical or functional question, encounters an integration issue, or just gets stuck, help is immediately available. People can more easily stay on process, stay focused on business value, and celebrate incremental successes. When team members can talk to each other exactly when they need to, problems get solved faster and better. When really big problems arise, the best minds in the group are right there to brainstorm solutions. Team cohesion, camaraderie, ambient trust and respect, listening skills, and other measures of social health all improve. And this camaraderie translates directly into higher productivity.

This does not mean open workspaces don’t come with their own personal productivity challenges, but the increases in team communication, collaboration, and software delivery speed need to be weighed against other considerations.  In some company situations, a common team room environment can be paired with a personal space, although most teams don’t have the luxury of both office scenarios.

In many instances, where there is a desire to transition to a common team room, the cost may be prohibitive.  However, progress can still be made in terms of team interaction.  Sometimes there are opportunities to take over a large conference room for a shorter period of time, to organize mini-work areas for 2-4 of the team members, or if nothing else, to have team members (including testers, analysts, technical writers, etc.) work together in offices for extended periods of time during the day.

When common workspaces are simply not feasible, the higher-bandwidth the communication alternatives, the better.  Video conferencing, Skype, web conferencing, and real-time chat are less than ideal substitutes for face-to-face communication, but significantly outperform email and phone messages as team productivity tools.  Teams don’t have to implement higher fidelity communication channels, but in scenarios where speed and productivity truly matter (are there any software development projects where this is not the case?), every effort should be made.  More often than not, early trial and error will help a team settle on the best mix of communication technology.