In many projects, the rules of engagement is often vague and undefined. This is because standard communication plan assume a constant and stable environment. This is how waterfall projects are being run in the past. In agile projects, close collaboration is required and this blurred the formality of communication. To avoid misunderstanding, it is recommended to set some guidelines for rules of engagement with one another.
Standup Meeting
If you are familiar to Scrum, standup meetings are timeboxed to last 15min. In reality, this often overruns if you have more than 3 people. You should review this communication internally and give a realistic timebox. There are some who are not able to articulate the objectives within 5min. If so, there should be other breakout sessions to handle this. Thus, you must be disciplined to time box accurately.
Sprint Retrospective
The sprint retrospective is another good concept that can be used rules of engagement regardless of project type. Some will remember it as AAR (After Action Review), “post-mortem” or project review. The key communication objectives are to understand what goes wrong and ways for improvement. You can also share the good points and reinforce project communication for the next one.
The basic project rules of engagement can be classified loosely as daily standup and post review like sprint retrospective. These encourage project team to collaborate and communicate closely with one another.
Danny Kwok 