Colocation Adoption

5 comments to Colocation Adoption

• Cote'

  August 15, 2006 at 10:02 pm

  For sometime I’ve been a One Big Room nut, but having had a different vantage point for sometime, it seems like it Just Doesn’t Work in the real world.

  We’ll see how the Agile world takes it…assuming it’s true. Suggesting that it doesn’t matter is high-taboo.

• Ed Gibbs

  August 16, 2006 at 4:53 am

  While it obviously matters, in many cases it would appear it’s one of those practices that are left behind because the political situation is to difficult to resolve or possibly even that individuals are too attached to their own cubes. That and the fact that many office buildings are just setup for cubes.

  We’ve been able to setup at least two areas for Scrum teams that are just 8 cubes deep in a row with a shared team room that’s just a big cube. It really wasn’t all that hard.

  Not sure why it appears to be fairly difficult.

• G. Ferguson

  August 16, 2006 at 4:08 pm

  The company I work for is about to do this to the development teams. None of the developers want it. I have previously ‘endured’ it at other companies and found it to be a productivity and morale killer.

  Your comment seemed to indicate the reluctance was on the part of the management team – in my experience, that is not the case.

• Ed Gibbs

  August 16, 2006 at 7:41 pm

  In a perfect world you’d setup the team area with long tables, and then allow for private smaller offices for quiet work or single pairs, etc. You can probably get by with adjacent cubes since at least most of the conversations will be project related.

  My experience is the management team is unable to consider some idea of team rooms and private 1,2, or 3 person offices. The concept is usually just how are we going to layout the cubes and save enough offices for senior staff.

• Dave Nicolette

  August 17, 2006 at 7:05 am

  We’ve been successful with collocation at our shop. For that reason, I don’t agree with Cote’s suggestion that it might not work in the real world. It doesn’t get much more ploddingly “real” than a financial services company.

  How can any question be high taboo in a philosophy that encourages us to “question everything?” Ask away! If collocation turns out to be a bad idea, then let’s scrap it. But I’ve had good results with it, so I’m not prepared to scrap it just yet.

  What G Ferguson describes sounds like cultural resistance to change. That’s understandable. My suggestion is, don’t force the issue. Help people adopt whichever practices they’re ready to try. When they’ve experienced incrementally better results than usual, they’ll be a bit more open to trying additional practices. But if you simply require them to do things they don’t want to do, of course it won’t work.

  You don’t need a perfect world to set up a room with long tables, or make “pods” by pushing two desks together facing each other, or some other physical arrangement. You just need to get management to set aside a room for the team for the duration of the project.

  I read a study of pair programming recently that measured the effectiveness of remote pairing via some sort of network-based collaboration tool. The study found it made no difference whether the people were physically collocated. Anecdotally, I can tell you about a project I worked on some years ago before I had ever heard of “agile” in which we worked in pairs over a VPN, with each person working from home. It seems to have worked just fine. IMO the key point here is collaboration. As long as you encourage and facilitate collaboration somehow, you’re on the right track. If collocation isn’t feasible in a given situation, then skip it.

  I’m not one of those who says you’ve got to do all “the practices” or else you’re “not agile.” All the stuff we associate with “agile” and “lean” amounts to practices that people have found to be effective through experience. I see no reason why you can’t apply selected practices based on what your organization can accept and adopt. After all, we’re all about adaptability, right?