Project Influences You Might Not Know About
I’m currently consulting on a project and got one of those classic “consultant workstation” spots to sit at. Cramped legs and a very, very high traffic area sitting next to customer support people wearing headsets. Also what had been happening is that people were also taking liberties with our row’s personal articles (pens, papers, chairs even cases) so I told the person in charge of who sits where about it, and that I wanted to move (a lot of my team worked from home, but I asked for them too). The person in charge was more concerned with missing chairs than the waste of paying a lot of money to a consultant and giving them a practically useless workplace — but we had a common interest in missing things. So she started to decide where I would sit . . . .
And this is where it got interesting.
The people who were deciding the logistics of where people sat and what resources were available didn’t have a CLUE as to how software got developed. In fact, when we moved (moving in the corporations is as common as management turnover — every few months) she completely ignored my current dev manager’s requests and we spent an afternoon arranging cubes.
Its amazing, AMAZING to think that something so seemingly small could impact a project so much. Here are some of the things I mean:
- Almost no access to meeting rooms — death if you are doing agile. At one place we had scrums in stairwells.
- Developers getting the exact same machines (and privileges) as people who work in MS Word all day.
- Teams not getting notebooks — crucial for agile style or just working offsite.
- Seating far far apart.
It’s just a few. This time, the floor manager said “what do you do?” I said “development” and she’s like “great, I’ll put you up with the developers!”
Wow. I said “slow down there. I’m not working with them. I’m working on a project with a owner, designer, a UI person and PM for several websites and we need to sit together.”
It became very clear that someone who did not understand development was organizing people in functional areas, when some of us were clearly on component teams and not functional teams. To separate us was to stress our already stressed communications and decrease our productivity.
I don’t have any real solutions for this, but it has to be confronted. You have to say: “do you really want to decrease the team’s productivity, because it is?” And “The impact on our team is such and such because you are doing this to us.”
Be aware of things outside your project influencing your project, especially for people with preconceptions about it that don’t understand how development gets done.