Face It!

The sixth Agile Principle states: “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.” Deep down, we all know this is true, but sometimes it’s just easier to ping someone on Teams or CC them on an email thread. Technology, for all its strengths, perilously separates communication from interaction. As a reminder, here’s one recent example of how face-to-face communication helped my team find a totally new solution to an important problem.

My team was working on an app that needed data on international students. Unfortunately, the platform we were building in was not playing nice with the database. One of our engineers had spent a little over a week trying various solutions, but nothing was working. One day, I was in the break room microwaving my lunch when James (all names have been changed), someone from a completely different department, walked in. We started chatting and I mentioned our team’s problem. James gave me a suggestion and I took it back to Jane, our developer on the case. We turned the problem over and over until we found a way that it just might work! This meant that we had to work with Jake and his team, again, totally different than we originally thought.

When I went to chat with Jake about the viability of our new solution, we were able to effectively iron out how our teams could work together. Then, while we were talking about capabilities and limitations of this new solution, Jake mentioned a feature of the software that would allow us to solve yet another problem for the team regarding another use case of the app we were building. If we had been chatting over Teams, it’s very likely that this secondary conversation never would have happened, and we would have been left struggling with the long-term problem.

That might sound like the end of the story, but here’s the kicker: the conversations I had with Jake and James were not the first time I had ever spoken to them. I already knew them and had built rapport through other projects and spontaneous conversation as we crossed paths. If I hadn’t already interacted with either one of them, I would not have felt as comfortable and probably wouldn’t have opened up so much about the issues my team was facing. If I hadn’t already built that relationship, our team might have kept slogging through half-baked solutions for weeks, hoping to find the right one. As project assistants we can’t afford to only communicate when it’s absolutely necessary or even when it’s simply convenient. We should be communicating and interacting whenever and however we can. Each interaction is an investment. We never know who will hold the answer to a future roadblock.

Twenty-first century technology has revolutionized the workplace. With clicks and keystrokes, we can send and receive messages, documents, and links at a whim. We can collaborate across time zones, borders, and even language barriers, but this low-effort communication can also become a crutch. On the PMO Team, our client-facing responsibilities require us to get face to face with the clients. So get up! Go for a walk and talk to people. Build relationships. Build confidence. Build a network of people at work that will work for you—you never know what you may find.