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 .

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