on colocation

One of the interesting things I found was the impact of colocation on the productivity of teams.

Consider a team of six people working on a module. Try this out .. place them at random seats within an office floor out of line of sight from each other. What you will find is that they may as well be in different countries.

Now place them in a six person pod or cubicles adjescent to each other. You will be amazed at the difference this makes in their productivity.

Back in 96, I was amazed one day to find one team started the habit of standing up on their desks (across six partitioned cubicles) for a daily quick discussion / debrief. It was quite funny as this was before the days of 'agile' and 'standups' etc. They found it quite effective to just stand up on their desks and confer when they had a quick team decision to make.

Just something that make me smile back then.