SCM Communications

There is a thin boundary among two kinds of meta-information to be managed, between communications and documentation. In fact, there is no boundary at all: the distinction is only relative. In the context of communications, it is handy to refer to (relatively) stable information as something essentially distinct: documentation.

However, whereas documentation is only ever meta-information (information about something else), this is not necessarily the case of all communications. Communications is often understood as propagation of meta-information, but this is an oversight as meta-information is information in its own right, especially when its own value tightly relates to the degree to which it is spread, and may be assumed to be known. Communications is above all commitment i.e. creation of information.

The four essential aspects which make communications manageable are:

Asynchrony (you can talk without waiting that somebody is ready to listen—you can read when it suits you)
Persistence (what you said once, you don't need to repeat; what you wrote you can correct)
Publicity (what you said to someone, you don't need to repeat to others—the representation of information is shared, thus manageable)
Continuity (nothing of what was said is missing; every detail of what was said my be examined or developed in its own right).

A few cases of do and don't, in order to make this more concrete:

Don't attempt or expect to close the communications, by providing an unlikely final answer. Keep the channel open.
SCM doesn't bring here additional constraints, which would make it harder to contribute (than e.g. in a forum). There is no real extra effort in chunking one's input into separately identifiable representations.
Communications doesn't replace documentation. Only the latter should emerge from the former, and be able to refer to it. This is an extra effort, one of presentation, mostly summarizing. Documentation is however itself mostly a convenient basis for communications.
One should feel the payback. Resulting communications should be more fluent, faster, with less misunderstandings, and display a better signal per noise ratio. As with SCM in general.
Communications should be considered an essential part of SCM. It should happen within the SCM tool. Thus, the fact that people need to use mail or to organize meetings, considering all the related wasted time and effort, and frustration, can be diagnosed as a weakness of the SCM system.

A few pages on related topics: What is a Message?, Forum or Wiki?, Politics and Communications, Biased FAQ, No Presentations.

-- MarcGirod - 18 Feb 2007