Office to Team Room
management, scrum, software development
At the suggestion of a developer I’ve revisited the idea of turning my office into a true team room. After about 6 months in the cube farm my office is pretty much just used as a team room anyway. Here’s the current office:
The current layout has a few issues:
- One whole wall is locked out from whiteboard/corkboards due to some cubicle bookshelves.
- No table for longer meetings. It works fine for standups, but after 15 minutes you might want to sit down.
- The shelves along the north wall block easy access to the corkboard, so people have to reach to move around there tasks into the ‘tested/done’ column.
Here’s my team room concept:
With a little luck and the help of an admin who’s passionate about rethinking our space, I may be able to pull this off.
Ed Gibbs @ July 8, 2006
I can’t see the team room concept.. the suspense is killing me!
If you subscribe to the RSS feed, you can see the second image…funny that it works in my aggregator but not in the web interface.
I like the new setup, but where do you have your PC? Do you sit at the table?
There are six of us. We have simple desks on wheels (from Ikea), cradles for the PC, and a power supply connected to each desk. So we have one power cable and one ethernet cable going to the floorboxes from each desk. This way we can easily reconfigure for different team formations or for meetings.
In reality though this never happens and what we really need are laptops around a circular table, just like your new setup.
The biggest issue is the fact we have dual vesa mounted screens which are great to work with but form a barrier between the group and mean meetings have to be elsewhere.
Our dev team, CTO and Team Leader are all within the set up.. The sysadmin boys are off to the side due to their racks and racks of wind turbine-like servers.
We waste a lot of time debating over who reserved the meeting rooms and finding a good place to hold our scrums. If we could hold them at our workstations we would save huge amounts of time.
Here are a couple more arrangements for work areas. Anssi Piirainen posted a floor plan for the work area they set up at his company. Noel Llopis describes a setup with a dedicated work room for pair development and individual personal desks where people can go to check email and so forth.
At our company, we have to adapt to the physical workspace available at the client locations where we park our agile development teams. We’ve had some rooms set up with pods consisting of two desks pushed together, facing each other, with a two-person workstation on each side. We’ve had others with double line of long tables down the middle of the room and workstations arranged along both sides, facing each other. We had one project with the room set up with long tables along three walls and the workstations facing away from the center of the room. All these arrangements worked well. As long as the team can communicate easily and there is ample space for two people to work at each station, it’s all good.
Sorry, I messed up Anssi’s url. It’s Anssi Piirainen.
Thanks for all the responses, sounds like many of you have more extreme team rooms. I’m really turning my room into more of a ‘team meeting room’ concept to be shared by several teams and used for multiple ad-hoc meetings. Our admin got a different idea that I was converting it into a general meeting room to be reserved by anyone.
So there’s no workstations because I don’t expect anyone to have their machine in there. It actually could work for a smaller team of 2-4 developers, which does give me some ideas since we’ll be moving to new offices in about a year. The main idea is to have a team meeting room.