Lateral Communication | Glossary

Definition: 

Lateral communication is defined as an exchange or sharing information, ideas between people within a community, groups or units of organisation – anyone in one city can speak with anyone in another city. This is not only allowed, but encouraged in Agile ways of working. A couch should help the team remember the value of intensive communication even when distribution makes this harder. Communities communicate and store collective knowledge through lateral communication and is an essential ingredient in making hierarchies work

One significant benefit of lateral communication is that it helps counter the “mum effect”. The mum effect occurs when project participants fails to share bad news with others. Lateral communication is especially important on projects involving team members whose cultures and individual personalities make them less will to share bad news or more intimidated by those in leadership roles. Lateral communication involves not only the movement of information from the upper levels to the lower levels of the organisational hierarchy but also is defined primarily as the quality of information sharing among peers at similar levels.

Further Reading:
Book: SUCCEEDING WITH AGILE Software Development Using Scrum by Mike Cohn

Knowledge Waste | Glossary

Definition: 

Knowledge waste is referred to either lost opportunities to learn or learning less than we could have from a situation. Allen Ward a lean development expert divides knowledge waste into 3 categories scatter, hand-off and wishful thinking.

Scatter happens when anything breaks the flow of work. At project level, scatter occurs when the team is interrupted, when it is asked to stop what it’s doing and work on a different feature, when a person is added to or removed from the team, or when the team is harassed for updates on its progress toward an urgent task. Barriers to communication and poor tools are two main causes to scatter. Hand-offs  is defined as a separation of knowledge, responsibility, action and feedback. In traditional way of development, hand-offs occurs at every phase. Wishful thinking refers here to making decisions without adequate information to support those decisions. Late projects are the most obvious results of wishful thinking. Continuous improvement is part of Scrum, failing to learn, and wasting the knowledge gained are serious deficiencies.

Further Reading:
Book: SUCCEEDING WITH AGILE Software Development Using Scrum by Mike Cohn