Collaboration

Quality communication, at its root, is simply the easy exchange of ideas and is pinnacle to creating an effective team. In my new role at Booz Allen Hamilton, a vast majority of training is dedicated to quality communication through the agile scrum methodology. Specifically, the SAFe methodology. We are taught to define our goals/issues, track our progress with these goals, and on a daily basis communicate our progress with the team. Most surprising to me, is the importance of not wasting time during these sync-ups. Most of these meetings are 15 minutes, but no more than 30. Each developer says what they need to say quickly and accurately, and then passes it on to the next. But good communication comes in many forms.

On our project, we are working with an open-source platform called Backstage. This platform was created by Spotify to solve a communications issue that stagnated the developers efficiency in the quickly growing company. As the company became larger, the ability to share code, tools, docs, etc became exponentially harder. In order to solve this issue, a platform needed to be created where everything across teams could be easily located on a uniform UI. Backstage has increased Spotify's efficiency and significantly lowered their onboarding process to such an extent that many other companies, projects, and software teams (including mine), are migrating their software onto the platform, creating an easier way for developers to communicate and share code.

Quality communication can be accomplished by adopting the techniques listed above - quality meetings, constant communication, and effective tooling. Quality communication will lead to effective cooperation which will lead to a better product