Babylon's failure

According to Genesis, the Tower of Babylon is the second engineering feat of mankind following Noah's Ark, but the tower of Babylon is also the first project to be completely failed. Why are projects with clear goals and adequate human and material resources still failing at the end? The management lesson presented to us by the tower of Babylon is the lack of communication and communication, and the outcome of communication-organizations. They cannot talk to each other and thus cooperate. When cooperation fails, the work is paused. Through the lines of history books, we speculate that the lack of communication leads to debate, frustration, and group suspicion. Soon the tribe began to split-people chose to be isolated, rather than quarreling with each other.

Communication is the core element of the entire project team. The common vision, objectives, progress tasks, problems, risks, and ideas of the project must be communicated. Effective team communication is an essential element to improve the competitiveness of the team. The Project Manager spends 90% of his/her time communicating. with communication, the project manager has a shared vision and collaboration atmosphere, there is an exchange and collision of ideas.

1. in conversation, judgment is more important than eloquence. -Granian

2. There are many secrets hidden in the heart that are disclosed through the eyes rather than through the mouth.-Emerson

3. A single debate may be a shortcut between two minds. -Ha Gibran

4. Be a good listener and encourage others to talk about themselves. -Dell Carnegie card

5. If you want to be a good talker, you should be the first person to listen.-Dell Carnegie card

6. Talking to people once can often inspire your mind more than having to work in closed doors for many years. Thoughts must be produced in interactions with people, and processed and expressed in loneliness. -Leo tolstez

Agile Software Development emphasizes communication and collaboration. In the agile declaration, an important principle is introduced: individuals and interactions are superior to processes and tools. See the importance of communication and interaction in Agile development.

There are many forms of communication. Although face-to-face communication is the most efficient and valuable way of communication, the cost of meeting communication is also increasing with the rise of Internet virtual communities and Distributed Remote development. Therefore, in the online collaboration mode, communication between different platforms and systems is promoted, including instant messaging (IM) and project team groups, Team communities, blogs, and telephones, netMeeting and so on have become popular communication methods. When the project team has a common team vision and a general vocabulary, these communications will play an increasingly important role.

Based on the remote development and virtual environment, we always need to remember that the team vision and General vocabulary are the basis of communication.

We all know that the communication channel for a team of N people is n (N-1)/2, and how to reduce the communication channel involves the setting of the team's organizational structure and role. What we are most worried about is that the organizational structure is too complex and affects the efficiency of communication.

In fact, a tree-like organizational structure emerged as a structure of power and responsibility. Its basic principle-non-repetition of management roles-leads to tree-like management structure. However, the structure of the communication is not so strict, and the tree structure is almost impossible to describe the communication, because the communication is carried out through the mesh structure. In many engineering activities, tree-like structure cannot be precisely used to describe general teams, special working groups, committees, or even matrix structures.

Generally, product owners (project managers) and Technical Directors (development managers) are set up in larger development teams. They are responsible for the project progress and objectives, and for technical solutions and ideas. The skills required by these two roles are very different. These skills can be combined in different ways. The special skills of product owners and technical directors can be combined in different ways to control and govern the relationship between them. The team building must be organized according to the involved personnel, rather than simply arranging the personnel according to the theory.

In small teams, the same person is generally responsible for both product owners and Technical Directors. In this case, communication is certainly not a big problem, however, we rarely find people with both qualified management and technical skills. When a large team is divided into two people, we generally advocate the product owner as the overall command of the entire team, but the book has come up with an important point, that is, the product owner must declare the technical authority of the technical director in advance. To achieve this, product owners and technical directors must share similar ideas in basic technical theories. In many cases, communication barriers are caused by the differences in views and conflicts between product owners and Technical Directors.