The 12 Days of Agile Principles! Principle #6

Inspired by The 12 Days of Christmas we’re exploring the principles behind the Agile Manifesto. Originally defined in 2001, The Principles of the Agile Manifesto are still highly relevant to Agile approaches today. So like an advent calendar of Agility, we're unwrapping one principle each day for the 12 working days - Monday to Friday, leading up to Xmas. By the time we conclude we should all be in the festive spirit!

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Welcome to DAY 6 of ‘The 12 Days of Agile Principles’… and the halfway point!  

PRINCIPLE #6

The most efficient & effective method of conveying information to & within a development team is
face-to-face conversation.

Here’s a graph that came from Alistair Cockburn that I keep returning to. It shows the effectiveness of various forms of communication, which is why we love a lotta face to face convos. Ideally it’s a conversation at the whiteboard - why? 

Well, we all have some pre-conceived notions in our head about what we are trying to achieve, its only when we get them out of our head and onto some shared medium where we can agree the shape of things together, that we can turn our individual ideas into a collective new model (This would make more sense to you if I was face-to-face with you at a whiteboard I’m sure).  

Unfortunately this concept has experienced some disabuse with some people claiming Agile can never be used on remote teams, heresy that I de-bunk here in a previous post. 

Sharing concepts on some collective medium is the most productive conduit to turn idea into reality. Most efficient and effective is face to face on a whiteboard, but we are getting pretty good at proxying that with the addition of technology which will only improve over time. 

Other fun ways that face to face conversation is highly utilised in Agile teams: eyeballing each other at planning events to ensure we have all signed up to an achievable plan, standing up and talking through our progress and impediments at a wall that visualises the work we are doing, and hopefully interacting in other non work related events such as eating together, grabbing a coffee and a chat and participating in other interests loosely affiliated to your org.  If you start from a base of assuming you want to be able to enjoy or at least proxy face to face communication at all of these styles of events then you’re a good way along your journey to facilitating efficient and effective communication. 

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Continue on to Agile Principle #7 or join the conversation at @TheRebootCo. 

#12daysofAgilePrinciples