You fight enough battles to remove impediments and eventually you stop beating your head on the wall. A lot of impediments can be removed with some attention and pestering, but others are above your grade to change. Often after a few attempts you learn to accept sub-optimization.
Lately I’ve been given a few lessons in returning to try lost battles again. In quite a few cases finding a good collocation space for a team is difficult. Spreading a team out across floors or building takes a nasty toll on communication and the inspect and adapt cycle. Still furniture police intimidate you into just moving on to look at different battles.
Maybe my guerilla fight for team collocation is earning dividends. In the past several months two other managers have fought and won battles to move teams into collocated areas. While I had dropped the fight for both of the teams, others with a fresh perspective simply spoke up and got some cubicles moved. And in both cases it made a big difference for the teams.
Aspects of Agile are beginning to cut furrows into our corporate process.