Team communication (especially via email) - open or closed by default? [closed]

Question

I am a reasonably experienced C# developer (about 5 year experience) that has recently been put in charge of my first development team as technical lead (varying between 3-5 other developers). Over the last 4 months in this role, one dilemma that keeps arising is trying to find the right degree of sharing awareness of the communication that goes on between the project manager, account manager, clients, designers, CEO and myself (especially via emails).

On the one hand, I know the more awareness each developer has of the overall direction of the project, the better they can understand the scope that their particular functionality has in the big picture.

However on the other hand, a lot of my time seems to be lost in the sea of emails between all the different stakeholders and managers, so I like to think that isolating the developers to just "what they need to do their current bit of work" will keep them free from interruptions.

I have considered just BCCing all the developers so they can filter these emails and essentially "opt in" to all the emails, but I'm concerned that some of the developers will just see this as extra noise to deal with. It may open the door to "too many cooks" if all the developers want to contribute to too many discussions. Yet on the other hand, other opinions can help me reach better decisions (i.e. House MD style).

Phew... so much to consider. Anyone have some wise guidance in this area?

Answer 1

Answering late, but still believe there is something to add to the superb advice given so far. To answer your question we need to go a level higher, hence the long response.

You’ve been made a tech lead responsible for team and although many aspects of your everyday job might seem to resemble your dev days the way you need to go about them has changed. In software development environment there is usually not that much of a tangible change when you appointed a tech lead (you’re probably still seating at the same desk, wearing the same outfit) as opposed to becoming a foreman on construction site or a factory. The flattering change though is that you now get invited into all these meeting and start getting all these e-mails and phone calls from people outside the dev team.

The lack of tangible change might trick your mind into thinking that you just need to keep treating your job mostly the same. This is not the case and you need to be conscious about your actions and re-actions in the new capacity. It might seem you’re now a bit “more respected” externally and you might be inclined to share some of that “respect” coming your way internally, play a bit of democracy and generally be fair.

Well, this is not that much about fairness or respect, the new job is to:

• Direct the dev team (mostly by personal example and creating imagery depicting the goal).

• Be an abstraction layer between the team and other organisational units.

Pretty much like in programming you often create an abstraction layer to encapsulate and hide complexity, the same happens in organisations. You’re the layer, the interface that has to encapsulate the dev team. And any good encapsulation from an outsider point of view:

• Hides inner complexity that is not relevant to the task at hand (such as concrete implementation of an algorithm) from the outside observer.

• Makes things that could affect the outside user explicit (exceptions that can be thrown, any limitations and constraints etc).

• Always gives meaningful feedback.

• Acts consistently.

These principles are equally applicable to the team’s outward communication. It’s not an easy task to follow these principles; actually it involves a lot of concrete work, such as deciding what details are internal and what facts need to be communicated and when, how the feedback needs to be best structured and be presented in a consistent manner and who should be notified externally of what, and who needs to followed up and when. This is a lot of work, even if some of it seems to be just trivial admin.

Now to internal, inward communication. One way is to broadcast. But it clogs the internal network and everyone has to spend their time on deciding whether the communication bears any relevance to them. It is like having a very generic algorithm that regardless of input always does the exact same amount of work. It’s sure possible, but why would you want to do that? A more efficient way is obviously to adjust processing depending on the input and here it has to be someone’s job to make a decision how the team should go about something, to dispatch, or convert the input:

• Decide what sequence of actions needs to be taken,

• or just acknowledge and store for future reference,

• or follow up,

• or put an issue off for a later review and then make sure it is reviewed and fed back into the decision-making loop.

This is not a small job either and someone has to do it. Obviously now it’s your job to manage the outward and inward communication, and you have to spend some of your brain’s processing power to do it well, so no one else has to and devs can concentrate on their tasks.

There are some other good reasons for not CC-ing or BCC-ing everyone regardless of your job title:

• TO means “take action”, CC — “take note for future reference”, BCC — “eavesdrop or mass mail”. You should be careful when you use one or another e-mailing a group of people:

  • E-mailing a single person is a straight forward “TO”, when E-mailing a group of people only “TO” these who you need to take action (including a simple acknowledgement). This is default meaning, in any other case explicitly tell them what is expected (i.e. FYI, no action needed etc).

  • CC only these who you want to take note of the information for the future reference. If you expect a number of e-mails to go back and forth before an agreement is reached or issue is resolved don’t “CC”, it’s best to send a summary confirmation later to other parties that need to be notified. Besides saving everyone’s time and avoiding misinterpretation due to someone taking note of a non-final communication that will help make exchange more personal, flow more naturally, and reduce formalism and red-tape. Often CC-d e-mails treated formally and this isn’t always a good thing (but sometimes exactly what you want).

  • Using BCC is almost never ok. The knowledge of someone eavesdropping on your conversations if come to light will easily ruin your trustworthiness. It is simply a question of “when”. And should your team worry then that you might be BCC-ing their conversations to someone else? Mass mailing through BCC in most cases is also wrong, it creates an impression that e-mail is specifically addressed to the recipient.

• Forwarding, CC-ing and BCC-ing require little effort, but multiply noise and dilutes signal. It is worth to give some thought to what exactly you need a person to do and what they should know to act on your communication before composing it.

• Some conversations are best taken completely "off line" (phone or better still face-to-face), because it gives you more room for maneveour. Broadcasting or formalising in writting is just like putting yourself into a corner. You can always confirm in writing latter.

Moving to the second part of a tech lead responsibility (directing the team through personal example and imagery depicting the goal). To accomplish that you don’t need to pass on to the team every single piece of information that happen to end in your inbox. You have to create a story and any good story is an abstraction of real events that consists of only relevant and interesting detail for a particular audience. Creating this brief story on the basis of your everyday experience and judging what is relevant and interesting and then presenting it regularly to the team is also quite a job.

But don't forget that by directing the team and serving as abstraction layer you help developers and outside world to interact more efficiently, accomplish more and tackle greater complexity, the job has a point.

Answer 2

The engineering team needs to understand the business reasons of why they are asked to do things on a macro-level. The engineering team will gain understanding and motivation from this. But too much chatter is a no-no, as you note, part of your job is to filter, and part of that means not exposing them to tons of noise. Your developers likely have opinions and insights as to how to do particular things or why to pick particular technologies, and they should be fielded for their expertise in those areas.

Definitely don't create a culture of BCCing.

One option is to have separate mailing lists that interested parties can subscribe to, but of course, not all chatter will be on those lists.

And of course, a regular company meeting is a must. Let the engineering guys know why the business depends on delivery of a stable, complete product (or whatever the upcoming milestones require). 20 minutes, no slides, no bullshit is what works for me. Your team & situation may vary.