This article is the first out of an unlimited series (let’s say at least 5!) where I’m gonna try to give you some ideas and easy things to put in place in order to bring your team closer to business people so that you can work collaboratively and efficiently with them.

It’s no secret; one of the reasons why many projects fail is caused by the lack of communication and the weak relationship between business people and development teams. This often ends up with an application that do not look like what the stakeholders wanted at the beginning and it’s even truer if you work in an non-Agile environment (reinforced by the tunnel effect in traditional software development methodologies)

The main way, via which development team communicates with business, is through the holy specifications document.

But specifications, as holy as they are, suffer from one big problem. Theo Schlossnagle explained it during its “Responsibly maximizing craftsmanship in software engineering”‘s talk at the Craft Conference:

Specifications themselves are incredibly difficult to get right. […] Specifications are not written in computer language. They’re written in a horrible, horrible, language to describe something explicitly, and that would be… English! Or any other language that humans use to communicate. If you can write poetry and have two people feel different things when they read your poetry then it’s obviously not the right language to write specifications that are supposed to produce always the same output!

In addition to not being understood the same way by different people, they are often written weeks before the project starts and that obviously won’t help either…

As often, it will be up to the development teams to rolls up its sleeves and bring changes!

By the way if someone knows the reasons why business people are frequently reluctant to change, I’m interested to know. My two cents is that we’re moving faster wearing sneakers than formal shoes ;-)

Specifications seem not to be the magic recipe, so what else could we do?

Let’s discuss!

The first idea is the simplest to put in place. It might seem a pretty obvious one, but guess what? It rarely occurs! This idea came to me while reading the very inspiring “Notes to a Software Team Leader: Growing Self Organizing Teams” book by Roy Osherove:

One way to refuse stakeholder requests is by letting the requesting party realize for themselves that there are better ways to spend the team’s time. […] If your stakeholder wants feature X, bring them up to the walled task board with Post-it notes and say “OK, which feature do you want to move down in order to build this?” Ask them to take down a feature from the in-progress column or the to-do column. This usually leads to an interesting conversation with the stakeholder about what each task means and how much time it was estimated for. By the end of the conversation, either the stakeholder realizes where the task fits in or you will. Either way, what wins is the value generated for the company.

Easy! ;-) By simply asking the business girl/guy to come and discuss about priority, both parts will see things from each other’s perspective. This is a really simple technique but should really open your minds. Lead without being aggressive this should reduce frictions and tension pretty quickly! (and this will obviously work with any kind of backlog, you don’t need sticky notes!)

This is just one example, you should easily find other opportunities to discuss and exchange with business, collaboration is the key here.

This first idea is quite easy and straightforward to put in place, stay tuned for a few others to come, that might require more energy :-)