Open Work Area
During the Second World War, when England absolutely had to learn
how to break very challenging Nazi cryptographic algorithms, they
assembled the best mathematicians and cryptographers they could find at
Bletchley Park. And they did not, then, place them all in separate
offices (cubicles had not yet been "invented"), to slave away at their
own pace in isolation. They placed them together as much as possible,
encouraging and requiring them to interact with each other. These guys
were, in fact, isolated from the rest of the
world. They worked, ate, and lived together. It was from this
tumultuous convergence that the brilliant ideas emerged that led to
code breaking machines (computers!) that eventually cracked the Enigma.
These ideas eventually helped win the war.
Many of us have experienced the team-building, "barn-raising"
effects of a small community of folks working on the same problem in a
fairly small space. Open-area "war-room" arrangements have repeatedly
been shown to facilitate team communication enormously. When a
programmer has a technical question, has a feature question, encounters
an integration conflict, or just plain gets stuck, help is immediately
available. People can more easily stay on process, stay focused on
business value, and celebrate successes. When people can talk to each
other at exactly the point when they need to, problems get solved
faster, and get solved better. When really big problems arise, the best
minds in the group are right there, available to brainstorm and throw
big ideas at it together. Those who have given it a good-faith attempt
typically report substantial benefits. Team cohesion, camaraderie,
ambient trust and respect, listening skills, and other measures of
social health all improve.
And this camaraderie translates directly into higher productivity.
Teams that like, trust, and respect each other, and that actually enjoy
working together, do better work, and do it faster. You would think
that we would not even need research to verify something so
self-evident.
In Extreme Programming, programmers are expected to all work within
earshot of each other in a single room full of workstations, and at
least one customer representative is also encouraged to work with them
in the room. And while "facilities issues" are notoriously problematic
politically and emotionally, lots of teams have made open areas work.
There are ways to encourage people to work in such open areas, without
asking them to give up all of their private space or "space status."
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