AGILE IN ACTION

In the software world, budgets are mostly about headcount and capital expenditure. Headcount is managed by cost per unit, where a unit is a person considered to be more or less a uniform resource capable of producing fixed output. On a cost per unit basis maybe 100 people offshore are cheaper than 10 onshore. But in my experience, more people means more waste.

For several weeks, due to a lack of desk space, it was not possible to sit with the team in the same workspace. The only way to detect stuff on my radar was to get up and physically walk across the office to the team's bullpen and try to glean from their body language, facial expressions and conversations what was going on. It's easy to miss out on the opportunity to contribute, guide or support situations that could empower the team. So once space became available last week I was glad to move across and join the team. The experience got me thinking about the power of observation and about raising ones awareness and using it to empower the team in a constructive and insightful way.

I'm happy to see that more people are uncompromising and are speaking out against doing the silly things that people justify with "that's reality". We create reality and we can therefore change it. Where there's a will there's a way.

We are creating a family of portals and a publishing system to manage their content. We have two sets of users. There are end users - the people in the public who read the content of these portals, and there are editors - employees in the organization (and its partners) who publish content to the portals. The Editorial Director is our Product Sponsor and the Senior Editor is our Onsite Customer. We're part of a product stream so we're colocated with the editors, our Customer and our Product Sponsor. Consequently collaboration is predominantly conversational, by that I mean it's relaxed and happening all the time. We also have some set pieces that occur throughout the iteration, which also help us collaborate with our Customer, the editorial team and the Product Sponsor.

Brian Marick recently blogged about power steering in reference to that old XP metaphor of the Customer driving the project like a person driving a car. He says: When you drive, you don't think about the steering wheel, you simply think about turning the car, and it turns. But when the power steering goes out, what was once a simple reflex is now a conscious act. In our new office, we're colocated with our Product Owners , our Product Sponsor, and our customer. The opportunity to be colocated to this degree doesn't happen often. It's usually obstructed by silly reasons such as office politics, silos and hierarchy, or part-time team members from the business side having to be located elsewhere. Our thanks go to our client for recognising the benefits of colocation and for wanting to do things properly. Everyone is buzzing about the approach we're using and I'm excited about facilitatating power steering to achieve continuously improving levels of customer collaboration and feedback and value flow to our customer.

Designing the layout