Agile! Agile! – Where Art Thou - Part 2 (Agile Workplaces)

“Atmosphere” is one of the key words here. We will be dwelling on one part of that in this post. One of the basic tenets of Agile Dev is excessive interaction. Agile extremists even sometimes encourage over communication. The idea is that such communication would easily help in removing disconnects and enriching solutions with varied ideas. The Agile methodology encourages a lot of face-face communications more than verbal or document based communication. The cool thing in face-face communication is that it enables you to communicate a lot in a shorter span of time. Besides that, more importantly, it also allows you to deviate and explore other unconnected but very relevant areas which wouldn’t have been discussed in a formal structured mode of communication.

Now let us look at how these needs affects workplace construction. If the amount of time you spend on face-face communication is considerable and the number of times you have such communications significant, then it makes sense to shrink the physical separation between two people. This would mean, having a separate room for each person doesn’t make much sense at all.

Some of the issues isolated rooms bring about:

1. The time taken to go from one room to another room to have the discussion is high and hence sometimes people may avoid such discussions
2. The general reticence of individuals to not disturb the feeling of privacy, an isolated room creates
3. An isolated room makes a person psychologically feel that ‘he’ his are trying to do ‘his’ job and ‘earn a living’, rather than feel that he is part of a team which is assembled for the purpose of completing a particular project.
4. Isolated rooms tend to make individuals form roots to the room they are in (Photographs, nice vases…) and would bring to their tiny office a feeling of a second home. Though this may be good in a way, it tends to make the individual distracted from the fact that he is in this building because he has a task at hand to do. The thought process should be more in the lines of “There is a project to do and I am working for it” rather than “I am there and I am working a project”. I hope you understand the subtle difference. In the former case, when the project vanishes, you become a nomad again searching for the next project. If there are no isolated rooms, but only project rooms, you truly become a nomad when you are not in a project. There the work place attains its true significance. You come to work place because there is some work to do, but not because there is a workplace to go to. The place where you go like that is only your ‘Home’. Workplace is not ‘Home’.
5. One slowly gets intolerant to other intrusions, or too private to open out to others. Both are blockades to free communication which will show in work.
6. For discussions to happen conference rooms have to be booked before hand and its availability is time-bound. Hence discussions have to be hurried, takes time to be planned, thus resulting in postponing and discounting of critical communication.

So how do we construct our workplace to suit SCRUM or Agile development? This is a very interesting question. Microsoft’s patterns and practices group which follow the SCRUM model has attempted to answer that in practice.

Please have a look at the below webcast to see how they have managed to model their workplace to suit the Agile model of development.

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=238321