inter team communication

We performed an exploratory case study at Axis Communications. Seniority (F8) of team members appears to be a factor that facilitates inter-team communication. Psychological distances can cause conflicts and difficulties in agreeing, e.g. Elizabeth Bjarnason. However, for certain tools, such as test management tools, the QA department has actively worked towards the use of common tools (lowering cognitive distance), despite this not always being popular with certain teams. The size of a team (F7) was mentioned by participants from two different teams as a factor that may affected the teams attitude to others (F3-F5), and in particular to inter-team versus intra-team communication. The awareness between teams in large-scale distributed development organisations is affected by distances, as well as by factors such as experience, team size, culture, and interaction frequency (Kiani et al. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csi.2016.06.002. This facilitates communication with developers. Internal Communications / Team Collaboration 12 Min Read Last Updated On October 19, 2022 Comms Strategy eBook Let's break down what team communication actually means. 2018). Finally, as research and knowledge of inter-team communication is accumulated and matures, we would welcome the development of an empirically based theory of inter-team communication that captures and represents this knowledge concisely, and thereby facilitates communicating this knowledge within software engineering. One participant described that they usually check which building they are located in and take a chance in going there. [Client 1] In this scenario, providing a face too, makes it is easier [Client 1] to locate people that you do not know. During interprofessional communication, verbal communication may include conversations between two or more members of the interprofessional team, usually in person as illustrated in Figure 3.2 or over the telephone. See more. Rahy and Bass studied tools for inter-team communication within agile software development for a distributed SME context consisting of in total 65 employees working at 2 sites (Rahy and Bass 2019). The companys existing physical meeting arenas can be complemented by virtual meeting points. the perceived cognitive and psychological distance to their team. The Role of Interpersonal Relations in Healthcare Team Communication and Patient Safety: A Proposed Model of Interpersonal Process in Teamwork Patient safety is compromised by medical errors and adverse events related to miscommunications among healthcare providers. ESEM12. When there are formally allocated contact persons, the time required to locate a suitable person may be reduced. This indicates the complexity of the issue of inter-team communication that ranges from aspects of the individual within a team to organisational issues such as team and work composition. For example, there appears to be more awareness of what older teams such as Camera 1, Camera 2 and Camera 3 do than for newer teams such as Non-video devices and Infrastructure [Client 1]. https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2018.2886178, Sosa ME, Eppinger SD, Rowles CM (2007) Are your engineers talking to one another when they should? https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30126-2_9, Bass M, Herbsleb JD, Lescher C (2009) A coordination risk analysis method for multi-site projects: experience report. If relevant, these factors were also placed on a piece of paper on the table. The case company encourages job rotation even though most manager do not want to lose their people [Client 2] due to issues caused by loss of competence for the team they are leaving [Client 2]. 2007). These characteristics are the age and the size of a team, the amount of senior team members, sense of team belonging, and the work tasks for which the team is responsible. For example, the Client 1 team works with a large and complex product that required specific competence, which then affect the communication to other teams. The posters were available for voting during 710 working days with some variations between teams, and then collected. The codes were, gradually extended, refined, and clustered as additional data was analysed, and our knowledge deepened. Thus, further research is needed to investigate how a strategy of encouraging awareness of distances can be implemented and how it may affect inter-team communication. Some teams, e.g. In addition, the exact set of meeting points within an organisation should be adjusted over time as needs surface and change (Dingsyr, Moe and Seim 2018). 2018). One participant said: We are engineers; its dangerous to talk to someone you dont know [laughter]. [Camera 1] Another person said [about Client 1]: Half of us are sort of social. For example, by rotating engineers responsible for contributing to the solution description. Another approach to facilitate knowledge sharing is the use of guilds, which was studied by mite et al. These challenges may be correlated to their attitude toward these teams and to the fact that they are located in a different building, i.e. Group communication skills 4. 2018). The study was initiated in response to the companys need to address the challenge of managing inter-team communication within their growing software development organization, see Section4. 2018). 1988; Bjarnason et al. Google Scholar, Bass JM (2019) Future trends in agile at scale: a summary of the 7th international workshop on large-scale agile development. Then you have to allocate an hour just to go and talk to someone [Camera 1]. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14358-3_6, Paasivaara M et al (2014) Supporting a large-scale lean and agile transformation by defining common values. It becomes harder to work together if you are not located in the same building, rather than 10 steps away. Thus, we defined the following two research questions in the context of a large co-located software engineering organisation: RQ1 What factors affect inter-team communication and how do they relate to distances? The focus group participants perceived short-term rotation as a good option since it is a big step to change team [Client 2]. The physical arenas that are provided within an office building or site, facilitate physical meeting points for both spontaneous and planned interactions. In:2011 IEEE 19th international requirements engineering conference, pp 3746, Bjrnson FO et al (2018) Inter-team coordination in large-scale agile development: a case study of three enabling mechanisms. At the time of the study, the QA department employed 185 test engineers organised into ten test teams, see Table 1. Axis Communications offers intelligent security solutions and network products based on an open platform. Bug trails also create a need for interaction. The importance of certain coordinating roles, contact people, or boundary spanners, was also confirmed in the shape of formal experts that communicate knowledge between teams. 1) Establish clear channels of communication. These problems frequently caused delays as teams were blocked by unforeseen events caused by unidentified dependencies. Organizational changes (team split / merge), Targeted products (similar technical domain). The knowledge synthesis including the analysis of the focus group data was primarily performed by the 1st author who also performed the literature review, and discussed this with the 2nd author. By David Anttony April 6, 2022 Here's an idea we can all get behind: in an ideal workplace, team communication and collaboration would be open, friendly, and professional. Weak awareness of dependencies between teams is one major reason for misalignment and in-effective coordination in large-scale distributed software development projects, as was concluded by Bick et al. For these two teams there is a Medium to High cognitive distance (on average 2.32.5) and a Medium psychological distance (on average 1.52.0). 2018). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2015.05.004, Bjarnason E, Bern BG, Svedberg L (2018) A case study of distances in a large co-located software development organisation. One member of the Camera 3 team expressed this as If you talk to someone often you get to know them and know what they can do. D2 Organisational. This causes challenges both within global software engineering (Herbsleb and Grinter 1999; Begel et al. 2018) including knowledge networks (mite et al. Another person expressed that allocating formal contact people can cause issues when that person is unavailable, e.g. Some participants expressed that they consciously try to get to know people from the other teams [Camera 3] at these events. Vote by distributing 10 markers each (in total) on the factors. https://doi.org/10.1109/RE.2008.26, Nguyen-Duc A, Cruzes DS (2013) Coordination of software development teams across organizational boundaryan exploratory study. We present and discuss our results in Section6. This was confirmed at the focus groups with two of the teams with the overall shortest psychological distance of all teams, namely Camera 1 and Camera 3. There is a risk that the obtained psychological and cognitive distance measurements incorrectly reflect the actual distances, partly due to risks related to self-assessment and partly due to the risk of participants incorrectly interpreting the questions in the interactive posters. Show boxplots of total cognitive and psychological distance. Google Scholar, Santos V, Goldman A, de Souza CRB (2015) Fostering effective inter-team knowledge sharing in agile software development. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91602-6_15, Brown SL, Eisenhardt KM (1995) Product development: past research, present findings, and future directions. Available at: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2372294. One participant described that information concerning what people do [is important], but it is more important to get to know people [Camera 1]. Each session only contained participants from one team to enable frank expression of potential issues experienced with other teams, and the sessions with the teams were limited to 34 team members to encourage all participants to share openly. 2018), there are also indications that other factors are at play such as experience, team size, culture, and interaction frequency (Kiani et al. interactive poster data, focus group transcriptions and related work was analysed gradually throughout the study, used as input to the next research step and, finally synthesised into the set of factors and strategies reported in this article. Kiani et al. This represents an opportunity for the company to further strengthen inter-team communication. Santos et al. Similarly, organisational belonging (F9) supports awareness of others (F1), at least within your own organisational unit. A teams attitude towards other teams is affected by the company culture (F3), having similar attitudes & opinions as other teams (F4) and by personality (F5). Jul 5, 2017 / by ATSG When team members fail to communicate effectively or when the flow of information breaks down between departments, business operations suffer. https://doi.org/10.1109/AUTEST.1978.764370. Acad Manag J 41(1):96107. We have seen in a previous study that awareness of the existence of a cognitive distance enables people to adapt the communication to the level of knowledge held by the other person and avoid misunderstandings due to tacit knowledge (Bjarnason and Sharp 2017). Most projects will demand the input of multiple creative voices. camera and client). 1. Cross-team collaboration, also known as cross-functional team collaboration, refers to a collection of different groups, whether it's designers, developers, content marketers, or sales, who all efficiently work together toward a common goal. Harrison et al. Further research is needed to validate and to explore what other relevant factors may be at play here. 5. How to overcome it: Create a company culture where employees are encouraged to speak up and ask questions. Similarly, work tasks (F10) affect the amount of team-external interaction. For example, assigning development team members to participate in other types of work within the team (Dingsyr, Moe and Seim 2018). For example, the teams Camera 1 and Camera 3 work together a lot, with work rotation and sharing of test cases [Camera 1]. 2008; Avritzer et al. We see three types of arenas that facilitate inter-team communication, namely physical, virtual and organisational arenas. 2011; Bjarnason and Sharp 2017). Whenever communication between two specific teams was mentioned in the transcripts, the quantitative data (distance measures) for these teams was consulted and considered in the analysis. At the focus groups, the participants described how their attitude towards other teams is based on a combination of factors such as company culture (F3), similar attitudes & opinions (F4), and personality (F5). The company also encourages informal meetings between people that usually do not work together, both through everyday activities such as coffee breaks and through organized activities such as department days (QA days for the QA department) where people are encouraged to mingle with people that they do not know. To address these research questions, we have performed an exploratory case study and studied ten teams belonging to the Quality Assurance department of a large R&D organisation that develops embedded software products. For example, when there is a cognitive distance (or difference) between people regarding the amount of domain knowledge for the system or component under development, additional effort is required to ensure that the requirements are uniformly understood within a development project. In terms of distances, the cognitive distance decreases as a team gains similar knowledge, thereby facilitating effective inter-team communication. [Client 1] or with [Managers] for the managers (separate) focus group. there is a large difference in work tasks (F10). This causes some delays in the inter-team communication but avoids the risk of potentially wasted journeys. with developers, and thus affects their sense of organisational belonging (F9). In: Proceedings eighth Asia-Pacific software engineering conference, Macao, China: IEEE Comput. through a multi-case study of four global software development projects (Nguyen-Duc et al. between client and camera teams, or between hardware and other teams. https://doi.org/10.1109/CHASE.2009.5071401, Bick S et al (2018) Coordination challenges in large-scale software development: a case study of planning misalignment in hybrid settings. Axis way of working is based on a corporate culture of cooperation and openness to change rather than on plan-based processes and formal communication channels between teams. This is in line with overall trends of an increase in system interaction, such as Internet of Things, where individual devices are expected to be integrated into larger systems. IEEE Trans Software Eng 39(3):343360. Expert Syst 31(3):234252, Tartaglia CM, Ramnath P (2005) Using open spaces to resolve cross team issue [software development]. Ten characteristics underpinning effective interdisciplinary team work were identified: positive leadership and management attributes; communication strategies and structures; personal rewards, training and development; appropriate resources and procedures; appropriate skill mix; supportive team climate; individual characteristics that support i. People who have rotated within the organisation often become informal contact points to other teams, and thus key people (S4). We used the quantitative data from the interactive posters to calculate distance measures, as described in Section5.1. Intercultural communication essentially means communication across different cultural boundaries. Our results indicate that personality is a relevant factor for managers to consider when composing teams and assigning work roles and responsibilities. 2018). Methods of Communication 6. 2017) and may do the same for interest and awareness of our research and thereby increase the impact of our research at the company. through Wiki pages and discussion forums. The part of Axis that is studied in this research, namely the Quality Assurance (QA) department, has grown during this past decade, from less than 20 in 2008 to over 180 people in 2018, and from one team located on the same floor to ten teams spread out over different buildings. During the focus groups, the participants gave many examples of how awareness of other teams affects the cognitive distance and their communication with these teams, both positively and negatively. It was easier to get things done through direct contact. 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Creating suitable physical arenas is vital since physical distance plays an important role in facilitating or hindering inter-team communication. We work in different ways. However, some teams perform their work very differently, even if there are technical dependencies. What discussion have there been in your teams related to this? https://doi.org/10.1109/ICGSE.2014.27. Fostering team spirit. Within the case company, various tools are used to facilitate interaction with distant teams. When the work tasks are similar and require similar competence, the cognitive distance is shorter. We present the concept of distances in software engineering in Section2, and related work on inter-team communication in Section3. Other physical arenas to consider are social areas for coffee breaks and lunches. 2016; Bjrnson et al. The total cognitive distance for each team is shown using boxplots based on the mean, 25 and 75% percentile values. Effective Team communication strategies 7. These channels complement the direct communication of physical meetings by enabling also distant teams to participate, and by providing knowledge, e.g. 2018). Lecture notes in business information processing. According to Merriam-Webster, communication is "a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior." 1. This is the risk of Radio silence as imposed by the key contact people interposing themselves in all inter-team communication rather than facilitating and encouraging inter-team interaction (Catolino et al. However, several participants thought that the impact was weaker than when actually working together, e.g. For teams that are reorganised, this awareness remains even after they are split into multiple team, at least for a period of time. The total distances per team were obtained by combining the poster votes (values 1, 2, or 3, see above) from all the teams toward each other team, and calculating the mean values and the 25 and 75% percentiles. 1998). Importance of team building (S2), represented by the QA days where team members are actively encouraged to meet people from other teams (lowering psychological distance) and where the hosting team has a chance to present their daily work (lowering cognitive distance).
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