What does every manager ask for when they really want to get a software project completed quickly? “Give me a war room.” We all know, almost instinctively, what they mean.
A mid-sized room full of white boards and peg boards covered with notes and drawings. Six or seven desks pushed together in the center of the room, each with one or two people working together staring intently at laptops connected to giant monitors. Questions, when asked, are spoken out loud so anyone can quickly answer.
There is an intensity to the room. A sense that the room was assembled for a purpose, a propose everyone in the room knows and understands.
The war room is a solid metaphor for agile space, but does it scale? Can you turn an office constructed as a giant cube farm into agile space without building lots of rooms?
Absolutely.
In fact, we can do far better than a war room. We can turn that entire cube farm into a war floor! A war floor is much nicer than just a war room.
To turn your old cube farm (or even your new cube farm) into a war floor do the following:
1. Remove the cubes
2. Make all walls whiteboards, metal boards, and pegboards
3. Acquire portable tables and computers
4. Acquire nice chairs for team members and folding chairs for visitors during demos
5. Drop power and internet from the ceiling
6. Let the team create the space they need for each project
Let agile teams be agile.
An agile war floor is a giant open space where team members arrange their desks and chairs to match the specific needs of the specific product they are working on. They always arrange their desks so they have at least one wall close by to be their task board. The rest, they improvise.
Removing the cubes allows for density and restructuring in an agile manner as the needs change. The war floor adjusts it appearance dynamically, in real time, as the needs of the team change. All without expensive build outs.
Build agile work spaces. Work spaces the team can change at the drop of a hat. The space, more than anything else, sets the tone for the entire agile journey. Do it well, and it will pay off for years to come in better agile behavior.
-Tom
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4 Replies to “The War Floor”
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Hi Tom, do you have any examples of actual war floor spaces?
For the West Coast USA visit Facebook. For the Midwest USA visit Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, MI. Note, Menlo just moved into new space so I don’t know if they still drop power and internet from the ceiling. For the East Coast???
The War Room appeals to a great many managers because there is a prevalent pattern I’ve seen in management of valuing the Hero and the Heroic Effort. I have a very incomplete theory about the power of heroic narrative in management reporting that starts to explain part of the continuing dysfunction in many IT shops. It basically comes down to the relative power of reporting on a Heroic Effort Made By My Team, vs. my regular, predictable and un-dramatic team that constantly produces at an even pace.
We all know the second team is what we all say we want, but the first team is what gets all the glory, awards and attention. At the team level, most people vastly prefer to work in the second environment, but at the management level, the incentive is all about reporting the first. You only have to look at motivational posters to see the prevalence of this sentiment.
This may work, at first, to the benefit of agile adoption, while it’s still seen as an Heroic Effort. But after a while, upper management tends to lose focus since there are no defining events that tell a compelling story. It’s all so routine. In other words, there’s not a whole lot requiring much “management,” only leadership and guidance of the product being worked on, which is more in the realm of the business stakeholders, and less glory for IT. For the IT managers, is more about process tweaking and guidance, which is much less interesting or feasible for most IT managers.
In many organizations, it just doesn’t make you look very interesting (at least to some sorts of managers) if in every management meeting all you have to report is “We delivered three releases, same as last meeting, with the same amount of scope as last time.”
There’s no sense of “dynamism,” no sense of “progression” or “continuous improvement” to tell a compelling story of onward and upward.
That’s why it’s important that if you are the manager of one of these boring (from a Heroic perspective), predictable teams, that your story should not be one focused on the efforts of the team, but on the outcome, the progress and dynamism of the product or system. It probably also helps to keep, at least for upper management, the same trappings of the War Room, the Heroic Effort and the Looming Crisis, even if your teams are just humming along doing predictable and routine delivery of extraordinary results.
Excellent analysis Andrew. I, of course, believe their are still massive productivity gains to be made way beyond even the best performing agile teams. So I am happy for a management team that really wants to advance to the next level. Of course, I’ve NEVER met one. 🙂
-Tom