How to best organize communication within and outside our project

Organized by Anne Fouilloux and Maiken Pedersen.
Room: Skeikampen

All NeIC projects need to organize both their internal and external communication. Most of us use tools such as slack, Zendesk, Github or/and Google drive both to organize communication within and outside the project and disseminate the results of our project.

Give your inputs by completing this survey (filling the survey does not require attendance, but is very useful for us anyway) and come to share your experience and help us to establish best practices!

Goals

The goal of this session is to share your experience on how you organize communication within/outside your project and learn about other NeiC project.

Practical information

  • Length of the session: 15:45-17:00
  • Requirements: fill the pre-crossteam questionnaire
  • Operation: a quick review of the pre-crossteam questionnaire results will be given and working groups (depending on the number of participants) will work together to establish good practices for efficient internal and external communications.

Learning outcomes

  • Get an overview of existing practices within NeIC
  • Learn about best practices for efficient internal and external communications

Internal communication

What do we use now? In what way do we use each format? Any room for improvement in ways to use each format, or use other formats more/less?

Internal wiki

  • Only 23% percent use the internal wiki.
    • Main reasons for not not using the internal wiki?
    • Wishes to use it more? Guidelines to organize contents on wiki?
    • Do people use Google docs or something else instead for internal communication?
    • How to improve use of wiki?

Slack and email 85%

  • In what situations do you use emails
    • Benefits of email?
    • Disadvantages of email?
    • How do you use email?
  • In what situation do you use slack?
    • Benefits of slack?
    • Disadvantages of slack?
    • How do you use slack?
  • Videoconference 46%
    • When do you have videoconference meetings? What type of situations, fixed meetings? Ad-hoc meetings?

What format fits best for what situation? Can we use one format more or less to improve our internal communication?

Deliverables

Only slightly above 20% use templates for their deliverables. The same amount make their own templates, or they write the deliverable as they want.

Could deliverables be made more efficient by using known templates? Would it be useful to have a template?

(Ask Kine if the Tieto templates are available for all projects).

Version control

50% have private repositories. Policy or random/historical reason?

Ask Radovan: We have github neicnordic, and coderefinery gitlab. Who can use what here?

External communication

70% agree or strongly agree that external communication is important. External wiki or NeIC website used (almost 50%) Twitter: 30% - private? Own project wiki 20% Other: 60% what? Emails are important. Conferences.

How should the external communication be organized? Our impression is that it is not very much formalized.

What format fits best for what situation? Can we use one format more or less to improve our external communication?

Results

a) which tools are good/bad/can be recommended etc b) use of the above tools, best practices for efficient and clear communication internally (what type of communication for what type of tool, chat, email etc) c) use of the above tools for good communication externally d) Would be fun if we could try to make a kind of dreamlist of good methods/practices to communicate, and try to see how far away our project is from this.

Result of questionnaire