The decision on how to layout an office is a difficult one,
largely because there are no obvious choices and there
are a lot of strong personal preferences.
For the purposes of this document, the groups of
interest in the software develop processes are: software, hardware, QA, equipment room,
customer (in the Agile sense) representitives.
The decision really can't be one of personal preference.
The decision has to be made on what will get you to your
delivery goal. Certainly a nice
work place must be provided no matter what choice is made.
Most people when asked will opt for offices.
Are offices affordable for your team? You'll have to talk with your
architect to get a realistic estimate for an office
build out. Offices can range from just a little bit more expensive than
cubes to a lot more expensive.
More importantly, offices are are probably not the best
layout for a startup. Software is a team sport. Rapid
communication between team members is the key to
quality and productivity.
Cubes are the worst of all worlds. They provide little privacy
and at the same time they make communication more difficult.
Resources
This section contains the research on which the recommendation was made.
Doubles normal productivity. Our study of six teams that experienced radical collocation showed that in
this setting they produced remarkable productivity improvements. Although the teammates were
not looking forward to working in close quarters, over time they realized the benefits
of having people at hand, both for coordination, problem solving and learning. They
adapted to the distractions of radical collocation, both by removing themselves to
nearby hotelling areas when they needed privacy, and by zoning out, made possible
because of the distance between people in the larger rooms. Of the nine kinds of
activities the team engaged in, only two were best done individually and separate from the rest
of the team.
- Saying that software development is a cooperative game of communication implies that a project's rate of progress is linked to how long it takes information to get from one person�s mind to another�s.
- A programmer these days costs a company about $2.10 per minute, so that adding one minute to getting a question answered adds $2.10 to the cost of the project. Standing up and walking to another table can add that minute.
- Suppose that people who program in pairs ask and get answers to 100 questions per week. Adding that minute's delay costs the project $210 per programmer per week. On a 12-person team, this is about $2,500 per week for the team, which adds up to $50,000 for a 20-week project.
For engineers comfortable with the noise and distraction of working closely
together, a technology �war room� at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the
perfect environment for speeding delivery of space mission design proposals.
In a field study conducted at a leading Fortune 100 company, we examined how having
development teams reside in their own large room (an arrangement called radical
collocation) affected system development. The collocated projects had significantly
higher productivity and shorter schedules than both the industry benchmarks and the
performance of past similar projects within the firm. The teams reported high
satisfaction about their process and both customers and project sponsors were
similarly highly satisfied. The analysis of questionnaire, interview, and observational
data from these teams showed that being "at hand," both visible and available, helped
them coordinate their work better and learn from each other. Radical collocation
seems to be one of the factors leading to high productivity in these teams.
To inform the design of groupware technologies such as those for cooperative buildings,
we investigated the work habits of teams that collaborate in dedicated project
rooms. We conducted field work that included interviews of teams in 9 U.S. companies
who had dedicated project rooms and a 6 week observation of one site. In our study,
team members using dedicated project rooms reported clear advantages: increased
learning, motivation, and coordination. Our findings suggest that cooperative
buildings need to support important features of collocated teamwork such as
flexible shared visual displays and awareness of team members� activities.
Says use offices because developers need quiet to get into the flow. This is
the classic book on workspace quality as well as management practices for
software developers. A quote: "As long as workers are crowded into noisy,
sterile, disruptive space, it's not worth improving anything but the workspace."
Interesting thread from Joel on Software. A lot of people both for and against war rooms.
General take away is that people like offices but realize that the war room is
more productive.
Another
related JOS thread.
Companies need to adopt a "caves and common areas" approach. This provides
employees small, quiet places to work, as well as their own team areas
for spontaneous collaboration, Sims says.
Their design consisted of individual offices of about 100 square feet
arranged in a pattern that allowed most to have an outside wall
with a window.
Lockheed's "skunk works" was one of the most sucessful engineering teams of all time.
This team achieved fame for its rapid development of a series of radical new airplane
designs in the second half of the 20th century, under the guidance of Jim Kelly and his
successor, Ben Rich. Ben Rich wrote about their experiences in the book Skunk Works (Rich 1994).
Rich highlights that, among the rules of the group, Kelly insisted on people taking
accountability for decisions from design through testing, and on their sitting close together.
The following quotation is from that book:
"Kelly kept those of us working on his airplane jammed together in one corner of our building... My three-man thermodynamics and propulsion group now shared space with the performance and stability-control people. Through a connecting door was the eight-man structures group. ... Henry and I could have reached through the doorway and shaken hands.
"... I was separated by a connecting doorway from the office of four structures guys, who configured the strength, loads, and weight of the airplane from preliminary design sketches. ... the aerodynamics group in my office began talking through the open door to the structures bunch about calculations on the center of pressures on the fuselage, when suddenly I got the idea of unhinging the door between us, laying the door between a couple of desks, tacking onto it a long sheet of paper, and having all of us join in designing the optimum final design. ... It took us a day and a half. ..."
"All that mattered to him was our proximity to the production floor: A stone`s throw was too far away; he wanted us only steps away from the shop workers, to make quick structural or parts changes or answer any of their questions."
Suggested productivity gains:
- 2x-10x depending on task
- Higher quality output
- Fewer changes overtime
- Better and faster decisions
Radical Collaction Recently used to:
- Annotate new genome data at Celera
- Design NASA space missions at JPL
- Evaluate fusion reactor designs at Snowmass
Makes the point that virtual teams can often work better
than face-to-face teams, especially when the team is made
up of diverse experts.
They don't seem to be comparing to radically colacted teams,
so i am not sure how the comparison would work then.
And i don't think this conclusion is valid for software development
itself in the same way that everyone on a soccer team couldn't play
on different fields effecively, though parts of project can be done
elsewhere under the right circumstances.
Some projects have such diverse requirements that they need a
variety of specialists to work on them. But often the
best-qualified specialists are scattered around the globe,
perhaps at several companies. Remarkably, an extensive benchmarking
study reveals, it isn't necessary to bring team members together
to get their best work. In fact, they can be even more productive
if they stay separated and do all their collaborating virtually.
The scores of successful virtual teams the authors examined didn't
have many of the psychological and practical obstacles that plagued
their more traditional, face-to-face counterparts. Team members
felt freer to contribute--especially outside their established
areas of expertise. The fact that such groups could not assemble
easily actually made their projects go faster, as people did not
wait for meetings to make decisions, and individuals, in the
comfort of their own offices, had full access to their files
and the complementary knowledge of their local colleagues.
Reaping those advantages, though, demanded shrewd management
of a virtual team's work processes and social dynamics.
Rather than depend on videoconferencing or e-mail, which
could be unwieldy or exclusionary, successful virtual teams
made extensive use of sophisticated online team rooms, where
everyone could easily see the state of the work in progress,
talk about the work in ongoing threaded discussions, and be
reminded of decisions, rationales, and commitments. Differences
were most effectively hashed out in teleconferences, which team
leaders also used to foster group identity and solidarity.
�The Academy�s work, including how the mind processes experiences, has many
implications for the creation of effective work environments � offices,
healthcare facilities, colleges and universities, research laboratories,
etc. We recognized early on the importance of ANFA�s pioneering work and
are pleased to be the exclusive participant from within the office furniture
industry,� says Joyce Bromberg, Steelcase�s director of Workplace Futures-
Explorations. �By partnering in this venture, we anticipate gaining a wealth
of new knowledge to apply to our ongoing research and development efforts.�
This article is short on useable advice. The larger point is that your
office does matter. How it matters is still an interesting question.
This document has a good section on workspace design, as well as being generally interesting.
Even the designer of the cubicle thinks they were maybe a bad idea, as millions of 'Dilberts' would agree.
Changing Attitudes
A recent study by Knoll of 850 white-collar workers found that 40 percent of Generation Y
workers, ages 18 to 29, preferred open work spaces without panels.
They want to create an "urban" environment with many different experiences.
Why your bosses want to turn your
new office into Greenwich Village.
Sometimes science doesn't matter and we just drool for cool.
The reality is that you walk into a sales office, factory, head office and in the first fifteen to twenty minutes, you will get a smell. You will a get a smell in the quality of the hum. You will get a smell in the looks in people's eyes. You will get a smell in how they walk about. That is the smell I am talking about -- in most manufacturing facilities, not just in India.
Although cubicles do provide facility cost savings compared with walled offices, they do so at the price of product development delays and increased product development costs. Decisions of facilities planners can have dramatic project schedule impact.
Our research does not show that open type offices have no disruptions. It underscores the importance of distinguishing between individual and team performance, and of understanding the relationship between the two. As individuals, we typically focus in on what we produce in any given unit of time. Open office environments, especially cubicles, reduce individual performance or productivity in a given unit of time. Individual performance, and that of the team, benefit over the life of the project in more team-oriented environments. In other words, this minute's interruption can be annoying, but over the life of the project such "interruptions" contribute to faster decisions, more timely feedback, stronger social relationships, greater trust, and a better sense of what is going on outside of one's own group.
The funnyiest thing you'll see today.