In one of my previous jobs, I led a development team for a very large photography company in Rochester, NY. It was standard practice there for there to be a digital camera available in every conference room for meeting participants to use to photograph the whiteboards to capture diagrams, minutes, and so forth. Buying a cheap digital camera, preferably with something like an EasyShare dock to make the process of extracting photos from it trivially simple, had been on my "to do" list for setting up our new office.
Instead, our CTO bought us a pair of PLUS M-11W scanning copyboards. I had used "digital whiteboards" in the past that used magnets or such, and wasn't impressed, but these are actually quite nice. The writing surface is an endless conveyor belt that feeds through a linear array scanner; you write on it with regular whiteboard markers, and it can save the scans to a USB thumb drive, or print directly to a colour inkjet printer. They were a bit of a bear to get physically into our project room and set up, but they've really grown on us, and we routinely post whiteboards from meetings and design sessions to our team wiki.
The down side is that they're only two of the seven whiteboards in our project room (and we're likely to simply cover the walls in our permanent space with 4' x 8' bathroom tile when we move), and are useless for capturing what's on, say, the whiteboard that we use for our status tracking. On the other had, the conveyor belt design means that we essentially get two whiteboards in the same physical wall space, one of which can be rotated out of the way. That has allowed us to do things like keep an updated living design of our main system workflow on one of them, without permanently sacrificing an entire whiteboard.
Would I buy them again for a future team? Probably. They cost about as much as a developer workstation, but scanning takes such little effort, and the scans are of higher quality than a digital camera photo (and free of glare) that we use them all the time, and the ability to keep a whiteboarded design around for later modification practically sells the gadget by itself. And a good magnetic whiteboard of similar area would cost an appreciable fraction of one of our scanning whiteboards.
We're also likely to be acquiring an inexpensive digital video camera with a still frame function very soon, so this isn't really an "either-or" choice for us anyway.
Now we just need to rig them so that they post to our Wiki automagically when we hit the "save" button....
Showing posts with label project room. Show all posts
Showing posts with label project room. Show all posts
19 August, 2007
The middle distance of communication
During my last job search, I had a really great conversation with the SVP of R&D for one of my top companies. The company was opening a new office, and our conversation got onto the subject of agile project rooms, which I was proposing to set up for the team if I came on board.
Two of the best teams that I've ever been on were an agile project co-located in a single room, and a "virtual office" project with no two team members in the same city. With the co-located team, it's obvious that sitting around the same table makes it easy to just speak up to talk to someone, or to overhear a conversation between pairing partners. In the virtual office case, it seems counterintuitive that we had good team communications (and jelled well), but it was so obvious to everyone that we absolutely had to make an effort to pick up the phone regularly and talk to one another.
I've worked in plenty of cube farm environments, where team members would sometimes go for weeks (or between weekly staff meetings) without ever having a conversation about pressing technical issues. It's easy to get complacent about a coworker being just down the cube aisle, or over in the next row, and then never get around to walking over and talking to them. As flimsy as cube partitions are for blocking out noise and distractions (i.e. they don't), they do create a barrier to communication that people need to spend some energy to overcome, and without the reinforcing effect of being obviously remote, it's one that's easy to let drop.
Joel Spolsky is big on giving all of his developers private offices with doors that they can shut. Leaving aside the extra real estate costs involved in doing that, that seems like an even easier way to let intra-team communication fall into that "death zone" in the middle distance. Certainly, cubes that let in noise and interruptions are far worse, but while private offices allow each individual developer to have more "flow" time to work independently, that's very much optimizing for the wrong thing -- what matters is the team's output, and that's largely a function of effective communications.
Communicating with people right next to you is easy. Communicating with those far away is important enough that you won't skip it. It's the middle distance where the danger lies.
Two of the best teams that I've ever been on were an agile project co-located in a single room, and a "virtual office" project with no two team members in the same city. With the co-located team, it's obvious that sitting around the same table makes it easy to just speak up to talk to someone, or to overhear a conversation between pairing partners. In the virtual office case, it seems counterintuitive that we had good team communications (and jelled well), but it was so obvious to everyone that we absolutely had to make an effort to pick up the phone regularly and talk to one another.
I've worked in plenty of cube farm environments, where team members would sometimes go for weeks (or between weekly staff meetings) without ever having a conversation about pressing technical issues. It's easy to get complacent about a coworker being just down the cube aisle, or over in the next row, and then never get around to walking over and talking to them. As flimsy as cube partitions are for blocking out noise and distractions (i.e. they don't), they do create a barrier to communication that people need to spend some energy to overcome, and without the reinforcing effect of being obviously remote, it's one that's easy to let drop.
Joel Spolsky is big on giving all of his developers private offices with doors that they can shut. Leaving aside the extra real estate costs involved in doing that, that seems like an even easier way to let intra-team communication fall into that "death zone" in the middle distance. Certainly, cubes that let in noise and interruptions are far worse, but while private offices allow each individual developer to have more "flow" time to work independently, that's very much optimizing for the wrong thing -- what matters is the team's output, and that's largely a function of effective communications.
Communicating with people right next to you is easy. Communicating with those far away is important enough that you won't skip it. It's the middle distance where the danger lies.
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