Introduction

The smallest AppUnite building block is a team. We want the team to have autonomy, but that doesn't mean they can make any decisions on their own. They usually depend on working with other teams. Teams must, therefore, communicate and collaborate effectively with one another. That means we want to excel at establishing communication channels that enable teams to move in the same direction, clearly communicate what they want to focus on, provide feedback to one another, and have feedback loops that allow them to evaluate their short- and long-term progress.

Team communication architecture

Team Situation

Quest

BAU (what it is and how to write them)

ADR

Events

1 on 1 meetings

Tools

Meetings

Meetings are a very important tool that you should use consciously, so you can effectively communicate with your environment.

Synchronous meetings are very energy-consuming activities in companies. We would like to follow a refactoring.fm advise on meetings:

  1. Use meetings only for 1) urgent, 2) complex or 3) personal matters — in other words, make sure the high "bandwidth" that meetings guarantee is put to good use.
  2. Be aggressive in involving only the relevant people — based on their role in the activity. People should join meetings not only to receive information but also to contribute to it. Those who are only Informed can be kept in the loop in other ways that do not block their time.
  3. Don't be afraid of using multiple tools — as long as boundaries are clear, this is rarely an issue. For example, it's totally acceptable to have a project mgmt tool focused on the dev experience (e.g. Jira), and another which is more high level (e.g. Trello, or a Google Doc) to display a recap for non-technical stakeholders.
  4. Display only information that is relevant to stakeholders — that is, tailor how to present things based on who will see them.
  5. Walk out of useless meetings - Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.
  6. Social time - Meetings have a social value for building trust and improving teamwork. Weekly meetings with client can improve the collaboration. Be careful that it is not an excuse to organize every new useless meeting.