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Communication between team members is the glue that makes a process, project or team successful.

Umano provides insights into your teams team's online communication flow, using behavioural patterns observed via group communication channels such as Slack, Bitbucket, Confluence and JIRA.

Understanding the flow of information is a primary signal of the cultural health of a team. Observing the way a team communicates online is particularly relevant for teams working remotely or that are distributed.

The communication flow insights provided by Umano include:

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Info

Umano's models use Slack, Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket to obtain information on communications.

Balanced communication

Balanced communication ensures all project members are involved in communications.

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Communication Balance

What is it

Communication balance measures the extent to which team members contribute to a team's online flow of information.

Why it matters

Encourage diversity of perspective and opinion, and address the dominance of individual team contributor(s) that may prevent quieter team contributor(s).

What ‘good’ looks like

Teams rating between 45% -80% typically have more mature online communication practices. We rarely see teams rating between 80-100%, at least not sustained when they do.

How Umano measures this

Umano determines the balance of a project's communications by looking at:

  • Messages sent in communication tools such as Slack

  • Comments in project management tools like Confluence and JIRA as well as Source code management tools like Git and Bitbucket

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  • Bitbucket

  • A perfect score (100) is achieved when all team members contribute equally to team communications on a given interval (e.g. 25%, 25%, 25%, 25% for a team of 4).

  • A team receives a score of 0 where team communications are dominated by a single team member on a given interval (e.g. 100%, 0%, 0%, 0% for a team of 4)

Practices that influence this measure

  • Message count

  • team members who haven’t interacted in the tools during the iteration period

  • percentage difference between the dominant speaker and other team members

  • communication pattern of each of the other team members.

What’s included?

Each model looks and specific activities within the tools. Below a list of activities that contribute to Balance of Communication and activities that do not have an impact on this metric.

Included

Not included

All messages in selected public channels in Slack and Mattermost

Comments on Jira tickets, Confluence pages and Bitbucket PR's

Direct messages or private channels

Creating or editing Jira descriptions, custom fields, labels etc.

Creating or editing Confluence pages

Creating or editing Bitbucket PR descriptions

Any communication from people outside of the linked team members.

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Tip

Ask quieter team members for their input with specific questions rather than a generic "@here" or "to all".

Supporting Resources

  • Google Psychological safety

  • Cultural Health/ Information flow

Responsiveness

Responsiveness of Communication measures the time in hours, taken for a team member to respond to a request of them.

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