(no subject)

[wshaffer]

I just spent the better part of an hour fixing a mistake that I made because an important piece of information seems to have been communicated to everyone except the person who needed it, i.e. me.

When we do the post-mortem on this project, there'll be some interesting observations on group communication.

Comments

[14cyclenotes.livejournal.com]

Hmm. "Interesting observations on group communication."

I was trained as a combat medic, if you need one when the time comes.

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

Heh. Thank you for the offer.

But, ire aside, something that I do find interesting: Frederick Brooks observed in his book The Mythical Man Month that as you increase the number of people working collaboratively in a group, the number of communication interactions increases more than linearly. And that this communications overhead is one of the reasons why you can't make a project take half the time by adding twice the number of people to it.

The thing that I've been observing is that as you increase the number of people working collaboratively in a group, or change the nature of the collaboration of a group of fixed size, not only does the number of communication interactions increase, but the number of specific messages that get forgotten, dropped, garbled, or routed to the wrong person increases. This seems like a problem we ought to be able to address, but I'm not sure how.