Agile team communication

Encouraging good communication within a team is one of Agile’s key areas of success. From daily stand-ups to pair programming, refinement and retrospective meetings, working in an open and collaborative way is a core tenet of Agile, whichever framework or methodology you subscribe to.

No hierarchy?

Many Agile approaches attempt to instigate flat organisational structures, where everyone on a team is (theoretically) on equal terms. You’ll also encounter evangelists using somewhat counter-productive phrases, such as “no more managers” or “remove all hierarchy” or similar calls promoting the abolition of traditional reporting structures.

In reality, you’ll find that the world (and by extension, all our work) is inherently hierarchical. Even a typical Scrum team has an implicit hierarchy in the form of the Product Owner. Sure, they don’t manage the team in the traditional sense – and in more mature Agile teams, they won’t be dictating what is included in each sprint – but they do have some authority. They get to choose this feature over that, set work priorities, time-box development activity and more – they’re just not micro-managing the technical development.

Scrum of Scrums

When there is more than one team, one approach to coordinate their efforts is the Scrum of Scrums:

With this approach, each Scrum team proceeds as normal, but each team identifies one person who attends the Scrum of Scrums meeting to coordinate the work of multiple Scrum teams. These meetings are analogous to the daily Scrum meeting, but do not necessarily happen every day.

The team member from each team attending the Scrum of Scrums is generally known as the team’s “ambassador”. Interestingly, the role that attends this meeting is not fixed (it could be the Scrum Master, Product Owner or one of the technical contributors). This leaves three important issues:

1. What is the agenda and knowledge of the attendee – business and technical roles often have conflicting priorities (and an Agile coach / Scrum Master may not understand either).
2. When there is inevitably some conflict between teams (priority, dependencies, solution architecture etc.), who is ultimately responsible for making those decisions?
3. Whose responsibility is it to maintain an overall product direction for the teams? What controls are in place to ensure the Scrum of Scrums team is able to reach a (consistent) consensus?

Network approach to communication

In Setchu, instead of using the Scrum of Scrums technique, it uses a predefined two-tier hierarchy. Multiple Agile feature teams are accountable to a single control team (made up of a Product Owner and Product Architect on equal standing):

Network based communication.

Teams (and any member thereof) are strongly encouraged to communicate informally and often, in a network manner, between each other to resolve minor issues and dependencies. There’s no hierarchy between the feature teams, but they are expected to try to reach decisions both sides are comfortable with, for most day-to-day interactions. Whenever that’s not possible or when a discussion highlights a wider concern, the issue is bubbled up to their (mutual) control team:

The control team is able to offer guidance and make decisions that are in the best interests of the overall product. As this team is a split between business and technical concerns, it is able to provide balanced solutions (and assess the wider impact) to their feature teams.

In this model, each team has clear ownership of its responsibility (and authority). When there is any ambiguity, there is a well-defined, central authority present to resolve the conflict – who are also ultimately accountable for the success of the product.

We are not chickens, nor are we pigs!

I frequently see Scrum teams continuing to use “Chickens and Pigs” to describe someone’s relationship to the team. Despite the potential negative connotations, I often read new articles and documentation still using this terminology – and there doesn’t seem to be much sign of this slowing down…

Now, for some, it may surprise you to know that the origin of the “Chicken and Pig” terminology was deliberately removed from the Scrum Guide way back in 2011 – yet people continue to use it. So, what do these animal names relate to in the real world of product development?

Participants

Not pigs!

This is your Agile (product or feature / “Scrum”) team – the people who will collaboratively work towards the team’s goal. Your team may occasionally include a number specialists, consultants and subject matter experts for portions of your product’s delivery (many scaled Agile frameworks acknowledge these as “secondary roles“). If you participate, you’re a participant – simple.

Observers

Not chickens!

This is anyone your team is likely to consult or inform. They may be stakeholders, accountable for the successful delivery of your product, but they are not responsible for implementing it (in the DAD framework, it specifically uses “stakeholder” to refer to someone materially impacted by the success of the product). They could also be the PMO, finance or some other function providing wider governance beyond the team’s “what and how” responsibility. All these observers may have influence over the product development, but they aren’t (actively) participating.

Interactions

If you’re going to attend a daily stand-up, it should be to participate, not just observe. Stating “I’m a chicken!” when it’s your turn to give an update just isn’t helpful. However, always remember that Agile requires collaboration to achieve its goals – so don’t attend if you’re going to try to dictate your agenda (if you have the authority, communicate your priorities via the Product Owner instead, for them to add to the team’s backlog where appropriate).

Don’t derail the process. Let the team be responsible for the level of detail it needs to be to get things done. Trust them to do their job, while they trust you to do yours.

Clear Responsibility

If we are dismissive of any possible offence or hurt feelings from those involved (poor little Jimmy doesn’t like being labelled as a dirty, ignorant pig), then what is the problem with referring to people as chicken and pigs?

To some, it may sound unprofessional, while to others it may be Zeitgeist. Personally, I don’t like overloading common, well understood words with non-intuitive meanings (and we’re already pushing our luck with “Agile”).
Most importantly, one thing Agile is frequently accused of is obfuscating common sense. That is exactly what these terms were doing – replacing words understood outside of the software development and product management context and creating an ambiguous, industry specific usage. That’s two legs baaaad, we’re not farm animals!