AGILE IN ACTION

Saturday, 13 October 2007

Humble beginnings

Posted by Simon Baker

We recently started working with a new client and have been located in a new office. The pictures below were taken on the first day in the first hour with people busy setting up their machines. We’ll be starting Iteration Zero on Wednesday .


The default back-to-back ‘workbench’ layout is not ideal. There’s very little room for timeouts and huddles, the space for stand-ups is not sufficient and there’s no open space where communication convection can swirl as in our preferred bullpen layout. We’ll run with it for now because we can’t physically separate the desks without them collapsing - each pair of back-to-back desks rests on a shared central spine. Apparently, there are moves afoot within the organisation to reassess working environments generally, and I understand that special considerations may be possible for agile teams. So I live in hope of changing the desk arrangement, but the furniture police point out that we’ll need to buy new desks and that makes it a budget issue for now.

At least we have one of our planning board s to put our goal roadmap on. Visibility on day one. I’m liking that and so are our two Product Owners .

Creative Commons Licence

Recent Posts

  1. System failure is inevitable so design for a fast recovery
  2. Delight comes as a surprise in unexpected places
  3. Help create business agility. Bake quality in
  4. Governance - Friend or Foe?
  5. 70% Forum
  6. Measuring purpose. Measuring customer delight
  7. Stop pushing features and start delighting users
  8. Lost without a goal
  9. Emotion creates the common language
  10. Five sneaky ways to kill an initiative

Archives

  1. 2012 (16)
  2. 2011 (24)
  3. 2010 (31)
  4. 2009 (41)
  5. 2008 (69)
  6. 2007 (152)
    1. December (11)
    2. November (7)
    3. October (17)
      1. Poster at d-tools
      2. Vertical slicing
      3. It's showtime
      4. Continuous Integration using Hudson
      5. Humble beginnings
      6. The power of colocation
      7. Self-discipline or just discipline?
      8. A Product Owner has many skills
      9. Accountability != Responsibility
      10. Treat estimates as solution budget
      11. Have you compromised your agility?
      12. Corporate idiocracy
      13. Mary Poppendieck at the Agile Business Conference
      14. Ken Schwaber at the Agile Business Conference
      15. You can't own something part-time
      16. At the Agile Business Conference
      17. Baker's Dozen poster
    4. September (8)
    5. August (7)
    6. July (13)
    7. June (15)
    8. May (24)
    9. April (14)
    10. March (19)
    11. February (7)
    12. January (10)
  7. 2006 (128)
  8. 2005 (63)
  9. 2004 (2)

Tags

agile (43) big visible chart (15) conference (40) culture (18) extreme programming (21) leadership (18) lean (47) people (26) planning (17) retrospective (18) scrum (41) story (19) team (30) testing (19) xpday (19)