Jim MedlockSprint 1 — Friday
Communication is the Key to Success
By now you might be tired of hearing about how important it is to communicate with your teammates. But the reason is it is the single most important contributor to the success of Voyage Teams!
There are multiple ways to communicate — realtime team meetings, posts in your team channel, and DM’s to name a few. But have you also realized that your Project Backlog is also an effective way to let your teammates know what you are doing and how you are progressing?
The Project Backlog shouldn’t be a static document you create and then forget! It is a map that not only let you know what should be done, but also a running log that’s useful for maintaining a record of your status , issues & questions , and accomplishments related to a particular task.
It takes communication + collaboration + technical expertise to be successful
Updating it in every sprint at the point in time when new information becomes available makes it a resource for everyone on the team to answer questions like:
- What should be done next?
- What needs to be done to make sure no one is waiting on you?
- What questions or issues have come up that need to be resolved?
- Who needs help and how you can assist them?
- Are members working towards the same goal and is there any confusion over what needs to be done?
Tools like ZenHub, Jira, and Trello that integrate with GitHub provide other useful features to help such as being able to cross-reference tasks, automatically update backlog tasks when PR’s are processed, and tracking dependencies between tasks.
However, keep in mind that the tools you use can make the job easier, but they all start with everyone’s commitment to sharing information openly, frankly, and in a timely manner.
And once you‘ve created your Backlog you’ll be ready to start planning your first sprint and you find that planning what you need to do becomes easier! This video shows you how to go about that.
Before you Go!
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