A nice article about the potential benefits of colocated working.
AGILE IN ACTION: Why would I want to sit with that bunch of nutters?
For years Frank Carver has been paying attention to the strange world of convergent technology. During that time he has discussed and researched broad subject areas, come to some surprising conclusions, produced and distributed digital media, scattered ideas and opinions like sparks from a firework, and above all consulted for businesses both large and small to help develop and deploy successful systems, services, and products in this highly complex arena.
Steve | September 12th, 2008 at 14:42 #
I once worked for an institute in Germany where all the contractors had small offices in the basement, and all the Angestellters had nicer offices in the middle floors and the top brass sat upstairs. I have never encountered such a chaotic organisation. There was no possibility of building a team, because the stakeholders hardly recognized each other.
My next job, at a similar institute in Canada, had an ever weirder problem. When the rooms had been laid out, one desk had been allocated to “Spacecraft Engineer”. The trouble was, Spacecraft Engineering had 30 engineers and technicians. So we had to occupy nooks and crannies about the ops room. Although it was chaos, people ended up occupying nooks and crannies where they could at least shout across to other people they depended on. Amazingly, this worked far better than the “organised” German planning. So sometimes, no planning is better than bad planning.