communication breakdown

There is nothing like dropping a Led Zeppelin song title to start off a random tangent but I digress.

I have been thinking about development recently and more specifically development failures. Each and every company I have been a part of, or will be a part of, there has been communication failures. These have been as simple as forgetting to implement a simple feature request to the much more critical.

I believe I know the root cause of communication failures: email.

People are very good about communicating these days, my inbox is a testament to the verbosity of colleagues, however very few people are good at organizing this potentially massive flow of information. Aside: next time you are wandering the halls look at the unread count/inbox size/number of sub-folders of your co-workers; it is scary out there. So, how can we remediate this problem.

Solution 1: train your employees to organize their email more effectively
Bzzzt. Not a good answer. People either have good or bad organizational skills and while to a certain extent they can learn to be better it is an added cost to the business. It also provides an immediate scapegoat for any future problems; "So-and-so didn't have the training and so that is why they lost some piece of information"

Solution 2: send less email
Seriously, next time you send a one-line "I agree" reply-to-all message just press delete. Of course, unless you have to say you agree; common sense should rule here. If you are just introducing noise to the conversation stay quiet.

Solution 3: use forums instead of email
Better. All communication is stored in a web accesible form by every team member. No valuable data is lost to an inbox while the team lead is on vacation, no private emails with jewels of crash reports are never entered into the issue tracking system. All knowledge is stored in a searchable environment. Possible nirvana.

Solution 4: use forums, a wiki, a document repository that can version and search files and ban email that contains project information
This is the ultimate solution.

• First off, you have a wiki that will be your "living document" that the requirements and use cases are meant to be; it will evolve as discussions and changes occur. It will not become the 100MB Word .doc that nobody seriously reads and is unsearchable
• Secondly, you have all the advantages of solution 3
• Thirdly, integration of new employees is much more simple as they can see the entire genesis of the project in a single space.
• Finally, and possibly most importantly you have an accountability guarantee: if all communication about the project is REQUIRED to be entered in the online space then people will be a lot more diligent about maintaining documents

I strongly believe that removing email and using the online collaboration tools that exist to document the entire lifespan of a project would dramatically reduce the number of miscues in projects. They would also provide invaluable information to any project that started on Version 2.0 with a massive documentation head start and great assistance to the maintenance team working on Version 1.1

Don't you agree?