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"War Rooms" Double Software Productivity
matt20 writes "Teams of workers that labored together for several months in specially designed "war rooms" were twice as productive as their counterparts working in traditional office arrangements, a study by University of Michigan researchers has found. Say goodbye to little cubes; it's war baby. I used to get tons done in a living room full of other people watching tv, doing
homework, and programming, but the biggest problem is always choosing the music.
Now only if that crazy guy in the wheel chair would stop tring to salute Hitler all the time, we could really get some work done.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I remember some condescending story on children a few years ago and how if you painted the classroom colours different it correlated to different speed and detail of work (condescending as they didn't try it on adults). There's some more detail on this at CNN.
My office has had "war room" style workspaces for years. All you need is a few Nerf guns and some rubber bands.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
Sitting down facing a screen, it doesn't really care if you work on the programming task at hand or if you play a couple rounds of xmame. With your peers all with you, you can't let the team down. So, by creating a team atmosphere, the end result is probably a constant fear of not wanting to screw things up for everyone ;)
On a lighter note, does anyone out there work in a "war room" type enviornment? It sounds like somewhere I'd like to work, but only if the chairs were leather and really comfortable ;)
-bugg
This reminds me of the claim of extreme programming that working in pairs increases productivity. I think it's just because you feel more guilty screwing around when the other guy is working, so you both end up working. Kind of a prisoners' dilemma, I guess.
I can believe that.
I often find myself going to the Operating Systems lab to get stuff done, just because it's quiet, it's locked, (to only let the real nerds in) and there are lots of computers there, and comfy chairs, and a big table in the middle and stuff...
Now if only I could get to the article. Anyone have it mirrored or cached or something?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
luckman
luckman
I don't involve myself with flames, much less know how to bait one.
anybody who knows anything knows that "war room" is simply a euphemism for "bong parlor". the reason people are more productive is because they're all too baked to talk to one another, focusing their energies on programming instead (which, as everybody who knows anything knows, is really easy to do stoned).
the old cubicle system didn't allow for huge hookah-parties, thereby forcing employees/programmers to smoke out of their own small pieces, which didn't really get them that baked, just enough that they couldn't concentrate on anything anymore.
as a side note, picking the music is never difficult in a bong parlor-- no matter what you pick, everybody will start bobbing along to the groove and saying, "dude this is pretty sweet. what is it?".
love,
grizzo
www.grizzo.com
it's 100% grizzo
grizzo: totally insecure, but very convenient.
We've got a wee micro company, in an industrial unit converted into a nice little open plan office. All the furniture is in a big loop and it can be very productive having everybody in the same space to bounce ideas off and go for mad creative and production drives.
But remember kids, headphones save lives!
"If IE is 'just a web browser' then emacs is 'just a text editor'."
It's worked wonders in my organization, and I suspect that the "war room" approach lends itself to similar types of productivity gains.
i've worked in lots of rooms where the idea was "let's get everyone who's working on this project into 1 room so they can all work together easily" -it was nice when you had a question, you could just shout it out. but you're interrupted so often by other people's phones ringing or their conversations that i think i ended up less productive. if you're put into one of those big offices, you'd better be able to tune out background noise easily. then again, that's probably pretty much the same w/ a floor full of cubicles.
it's a nice way to create a feeling of working as a team, but i think that instant messaging & lunches together or something like that works just as well.
I work for an ISP. None of the engineering staff has cubicles. We have an entire floor to ourselves with parts strewn all over the place. In one room, we have arcades...in another room,the vending machines. I personally have always loved this environment. Its true though...the only problem is the music ;)
Somebody should think of something else to call these things. It won't seem as foreboding to say "my company's starting to use happy-fun-good-worker rooms" instead of "war rooms".
I used to work in an open plan office. My table was essentially held up by the table of the guy opposite. We couldn't turn our monitors without bumping the other. I don't know what it did for his productivity, but he ended up teaching me C.
Meanwhile, all around were other pairs of tables. I can't say we had great communication, but at least you knew when someone was making a pot of tea.
So forgive my ignorance of the terminology, what exactly is a War Room layout anyways?
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
The only problem I see may arise from such a war room effort is that of personality conflicts between the memebers of the teams.
Would being in an enviormnet like this increase such conflicts and cause the general demise of the project.
Conversely it may push those with conflicts to come to swifter resloutions realizing that they must work in such a close enviorment for an extended period of time.
The main thing I found interesting about this article was the mention at the end on how this may help developers create better team software so that we can share this kind of enviormnet without being in the same physical space.
Tools like AIM and MSN Messanger as well as wEBX, XDrive, NetMetting and others are a great start but we definatly need more.
Maybe VR ala Snow Crash would be the anwser. Who knows. This is the type of research that needs to be done to find out though.
"Don't mess with him, he taunts the happy fun ball."
we have what we call the "Engineering War Room" where i work. generally the Engineers are set up in four-person megacubes (or whatever :), but when there's a big piece of the project to finish we'll all go into the "war room" for a few days.
i find that that many people working towards a common goal really get things done. the room is coated in whiteboards, and everybody is free to comment and join in.
i'm not sure if it would work on a regular basis however. the "war room" only seems to work when we have a very clear goal to achieve, and it can't be a task that spans over many weeks. but for getting specific tasks done, i definitely suggest using that model.
on a related note, i once interviewed with a consulting company called Sapient who the "war room" model almost exclusively. i imagine that this would work especially well in a consulting scenario.
- j
"Can't we all just get along?"
Nope. Not in a capitalist economy. Capitalism implies (hell, it defines!) competition, conflict, and 'only the strong survive.' Competing agencies getting along is anathema to capitalism.
Sad, ain't it?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
But, yes. Put 3-4 persons and their teamleader in the same room when they're developing new software from scratch, and the whole process of architecture and designing will almost solve itself, if those persons are software engineers and not just simple hackers .. ;)
it's in my head
I say we lock Rasterman, Mandrake, Linus, Alan, Jens Axboe, Ted T'so, Hemos, and CmdrTaco in a room, giving them breaks only for Number 1's and 2's and twinkies. Then I might get 2.4 and e0.17 before years end, and maybe there wouldnt be so much double posting here on /. :)
It works because workers surf/pr0n/slack less. If your boss could just move his eyes over and see you were reading slashdot when it was crunch-time, you'd be in big trouble, hence you work more instead of surfing. Not to mention the people that look at pr0n behind their closed office doors.
Ours is a generation that likes to surf and take lots of 'mini-breaks' when we are working by ourselves.
Having your boss sitting with you constantly changes the workhabits to create better productivity.
I'm not saying everyone does it, but I'm sure you have people at your office doing it, and 'war-rooms' would make them more productive...
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Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
That would be the big reason, IMO, for these findings.
Writing this as I am from a 8x10 cube right now, I can tell you that if I was in the same room with other people that worked on this code and could just shout out questions to them I would be a lot more productive.
Instead, I might spend a substantially longer time thrashing through the problem myself. Or when I do resort to tracking someone down, it's a lot harder to find them in this maze of cubicles. Sometimes I can spend half a day on and off just trying to find one guy.
-- dR.fuZZo
The term "War room" seems to fit the office I work in rather well. Although, it seems to go several different ways. My group of programmers has great potential to resolve problems quickly by working together, but when any of us has an arguement of any sort, the whole office is chaos.
You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Admit it. When you were a boy, you played with your GI Joe action figures and pretended to shoot each other with sticks and odd things you found around the house. But now you're all grown up and trying to write software for a living. Wouldn't it be nice to reconnect with that bit of your child hood and recapture a bit of those preadolescent cravings for a postadolescent testosterone rush?
It's not just a placebo effect. Numerous medical studies indicate that people behave differently in war-geared situations, even in times of peace. If you can convince software-developers to tap into their subconscious desire for conquest, then they can even begin to forgo sleep and food (though interestingly, not sex), in a pursuit of the artificially placed goal set by the company.
Building special "war rooms" both placates men's self-images (power-seeking) and provides a modicum of logistic support to enhance the illusion (nurture-seeking). Rather than discourage competition, today's companies are elevating it to the highest ideal, unmasking sublimated urges and unleashing great profit potential.
-- Anne Marie
They never did make that goal, or so it would seem. They appeared to be at war not with other computer sellers but the customers.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Have any of you actually seen or worked in a War Room? 99% of the time what a War Room is is an ex-conference room with 20 programmers shoved in there each with 3 feet of desk space and enough room to push their chairback and shove by their co-workers to go to the bathroom. (Obviously that's the bad end of the spectrum :) Your productivity may be higher but at what price? You have no privacy, you have to deal constantly with the personal (eating, hygene, social) issues of your fellow employees and the lack of your own space lowers your sense of value to the company.
Higher productivity in the shortrun doesn't make up for the higher stress and loss of company loyalty in the long run.
-Zane
This sig is worse than my last.
...Until the web designer decided his Super Soaker was more effective than our nerf weapons.
He chased one programmer into the server room. This resulted in an entire rack filled with fried boards.
So, it might be effective... as long as general stupidity is taken into consideration.
I telecommute and we use IRC as our war room. It works great 'cause I can tune in and out w/o hassle.
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Bah. Come on, people. There are 1001 better ways to improve efficiency than to rearrange the office furniture and give everyone a pretty view.
>"Can't we all just get along?"
Nope. Not in a capitalist economy. Capitalism implies (hell, it defines!) competition, conflict, and 'only the strong survive.' Competing agencies getting along is anathema to capitalism.
Bull. Capitalism is NOT "only the strong survive," and "getting along" is NOT "anathema to capitalism." Capitalism is freedom; often players in a capitalist economy specialize and then work together, because they are free to do so and it is to their benefit.
Sad, ain't it?
Slurs and misunderstanding sure are.
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I had one "war room" development experience. Not sure if was the company's idea or Anderson consulting.
No cubicles, no dividers, and no monitors that faced into walls or corners. Everything was public and open to inspection at all times. At first, the lack of privacy was maddening. Even if you had time to surf for porn, you wouldn't dare. The noise was a problem, but I found that you quickly adapted. Most people were pissed to fuming at the beginning but this passed.
The most amazing thing was the teaming that went on. You would think this sort of forced teaming wouldn't work, but it did. Programmers that normally played their hands close to the deck became show offs. Spontaneous groups would form for discussion or demos or to show off some nice coding tricks. By simply removing cubicles, a totally different dynamic was created!
I now work alone much of the time and I miss my "war room" days. Maybe more companies will follow if the productivity claims are proven. Maybe in the future, programmers will be placed in open glass enclosures to be shown off during company tours. As long as those touring are advised to keep their hands away from the programmers, there should be little injury. Most programmers might be surprised that they would actually thrive in a fishbowl of an environment. I know I was.
But it's a repeated prisoner's dilemma game, every moment, as long as you both are working. In other words, if you decide to start goofing off, and your partner decides to work, he gets to change his mind as soon as he sees you slacking.
Sure, when you play PD once, there's no reason not to defect. If you play a thousand times against the same player, on the other hand, defecting even once is dangerous.
Of course, it breaks down a little... in PD, if you both defect, you both lose. In real life, if you both goof off, but not so long that you delay the project, you feel like you've both won.
No bad habits... and you advocate sending them to get certifications?
I'm sorry but most certification programs do nothing but teach people bad habits. Asside from Cisco's, very few of them deal with real world scenarios that a typical admin will experience. And a certification is not experience... its nothing but a bit of fact learning and memorization for things that will prolly not ever get used much in the real world.
A Certifcation doesn't show a desire to stay current, it shows a desire to pad one's salary.
Bring in young admins who are eager and smart. Its that simple. They needs certifications to prove they are smart... simple lay out a couple of problems (some of which have nothing to do with computers) and ask them how they would solve them.
Keep code isolated? Where do you work? In the real world lots of people touch other people's code because thats the only way its ever going to work. Source control is a wonderous thing... learn it.
--- I do not moderate.
finally, someone who supports my movement away from cubes.
I have probally been a lucky guy. All the companies I have worked for (for the most part) have been of the 'war room' mentality
Actually @home (Comcast division) was the one that started out NOT as a WarRoom. It was cubicle world, and i'll tell you .. productivity was horrible. (nothing like having absolute privace when you want to play a little quake eh ?) but I moved to the web side, and that was like a bullpen. It was great. If I was having a code problem - I just had to say 'HEY!' and someone might have an answer.
C.H.I.M.P's abounded, so we might not even have to look away from our screens. Pr0n surfing, and goofing off was not activly discouraged, but when all your companions are busting a$$ to meet deadline - you feel a LOT more guilty looking at e-bay, (or slashdotting i suppose *grin*)
at the contractors im working with now (for the new blackanddecker.com site), its a low cubicle wall place .. in nice ordly rows, with lots of caffinated beverages for free in the kitchen. Its a more-or-less war room environment. There are tv's here, and people talk to each other more readily. (The graphics part of the company was busily setting up a slot car track about 30 mins ago .. smelled of Ozone galore !) However, in the last week (of crunch time) i have probally worked 60+ hours with this site .. and honestly .. its been a HELL of a lot easier to do so, than if i was stairing at the grey fabric covered walls of a cube.
Last week (admist a spontanious poll of how many people had a sock monkey as a kid - so far its 28 vs 20 .. close race - 2 voted "what the hell is a sock monkey", prompting for some RATHER interesting drawings on the 'warboard' )
we were here untill midnight (with some chineese food as fortification.) Much easier, and actually kind of FUN. Although I kinda glad that im not expected to do that it every day.
I'm all for the war room, sides .. its easier to shoot your boss with a nerfball when you can see him all the time.
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
How much of this alleged increased productivity was simply due to the Hawthorne Effect?
Researchers many years ago at a GE plant in Hawthorne, England wanted to demonstrate the effect of improved lighting. So they increased lighting levels, and lo, productivity went up.
The problem came during the check-back when they lowered lighting levels to the original lux. Productivity went up even further!
It turns out the Heizenberg's uncertainty principle applies to people as well: If you measure and watch something, people react to the closer attention.
I worked with two other people in a "mega cube" (with 6' high permenant "walls"). We dubbed it the "Playpen". The company firmly believed in giving people the resources they needed to do our jobs, so we had:
1) A very large whiteboard on one wall - with no furnature in front of it.
2) A spare computer and desk for "guests" to use during technical discussions (also used as a second terminal for the residents if they needed to run something that took a lot of resources)
3) It was a corner office in a tall office building, so it had an awesome view
4) Each person had their own phone
5) Nice workstations with 21" monitors
6) A comfortable "poof chair" (it is sort of a "full body" bean bag)
7) A shared bookshelf, so that you could borrow each other's books.
8) A collection of office toys, including a rubber-band powered plane (OSHA wouldn't have liked us flying that in the cube; too bad) and a bat suspended from the ceiling (it claimed to have a "soothing motion" - it didn't).
It worked VERY well since the three of us that shared the office all worked on the same projects at the same time. This environment was easily the most productive environment I've worked in.
People have mentioned "noise", though. It was true that music could be an issue. I recommend that companies buy GOOD headphones for every employee - a pair of $200 headphones can sound better than a $1000 set of speakers; once everyone has a set of these, you won't be able to pay them to listen to music on crappy computer speakers. The headphones should allow outside sound in and have at least 25' of cord (use an extension if you must).
As for ringing phones, that WAS annoying! It wasn't too bad, though, because we also had a "mini room" (actually two spare offices) across the hall. These rooms were used when people needed to have a long phone conversation, as they could go in and shut the door. This also gave some privacy. It was considered rude to talk for hours in the megacube, unless you were talking to everyone else there.
The furnature consisted of whatever we could dig up. I would recommend nice desks (single piece, not a U or L shaped desk) with LOTS of small tables. The ones that we had were 3' by 3' tables that could be configured however we wanted. If you wanted a "L" desk, you just grabbed three of these and put them on the left of your desk. I actually had a wrap-around desk build out of these. The nice thing is that you can reconfigure your space as appropriate for your work. We could, for instance, build a conference table in the middle of the room in a matter of minutes. All those nice "executive" desks really fall short in the ability to adjust to the work environment - they are nice for people who crave status symbols, but not for many others.
As you can see, though, this didn't save the company any money. The three of us had about twice the space we would have had if we lived in cubes. Not many companies could justify buying a poof chair for a space like this. Most environments I've worked in refuse to buy the most modern workstations for programmers, and 21" monitors are, sadly, rare. But, we were much more productive and I believe that our space and equipment cost less than additional employees would have.
I would also say that some of the positives of this environment came accidently. For instance, the company didn't think that being cheap on a bookshelf would increase productivity, but it did!
Perhaps it doubles productivity, but how sustainable is that productivity? Burn out is an important thing to avoid. Also, how high is the quality of what these people are doing? Writing twice as many lines of code does _not_ mean you are twice as productive, if you end up with tons of bugs as a result.
Pushing people do do more and to work longer and get things done faster is not the best way to get a productive work enviornment.
I work for a software engineering company with about 150 people spread out over two floors. We run the entire shop as open areas. Not cubicles, not offices - just an open area with plenty of power points, network drops and cellphones (wireless LAN forthcoming).
:-)
The advantage? Well, first of all, you're not limited by space constraints. When forming a new team, you simply put the right number of desks together, bring your computer, your cabinet, your chair and your coffee mug. With the right office furniture (pie-slice shaped desks), you can create a war camp for any number of people (well, at least six to twelve of them). Not being constrained by cubicle walls or office walls means being able to bring everyone (including testers, project managers and technical writers) into the team from square one without wasting real estate by having large war rooms that might not be filled. It also makes it much easier to move things like big whiteboards and 19" cabinets around.
Disadvantages? Very few. Some people don't like working in open areas and some people aren't team members. For those people, there are a few private offices that can be reserved for any period of time. There are also a few small rooms (1mx1m) scattered around the office, used for taking private phone calls.
As for privacy -- well, that's an issue (at least if you plan to visit hotgritsonnatalieportman.com during working hours). The solution is to be the first or second person to move into the new war camp, to be sure you can get your back against a wall
Sometimes it is really, really nice to be able to retreat into the confines of your cube and smash out some work. Having to live in the immediate presence of your coworkers may make you get a lot more done, but in my experience it has always made me much more edgy. Sometimes I need to just get away from the others and pound out the code. Having to endure other people's eyes on me all the time gets to me eventually.
OK, maybe instead of 'defines...', I should have said 'is de facto...'
I'm afraid that I don't believe it, though. Capitalism invariably degenerates into economic head-butting. Companies that work together, only do so to compete more aggressively against the competition. Intel and MS, for instance have worked together for years because they don't directly compete, but rather complement each other; and they've leveraged that collaboration to keep the upper edge. How many Alphas running OS/2 were sold in 1995-1997? (when the agreement was at its strongest, and also when those competing companies were producing very viable consumer products)
You may not agree, but that's how I see it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Everyone knows...
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here! It's the war room!
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
What's up with that? Hemos? CmdrTaco? Duh, those are the greatest programmers that participate in Linux movement? Do you think that sucking up this way to /. owners is going to result in +50 karma increase?
I say, vote for Jon Katz, now that's the guy to be locked in with! :)
http://dtum.livejournal.com
I must admit that sounds interesting. I just need to go to work for a company that has more than just me as the programmer.
I love working in an environment that includes other people next to or nearby. Where you can just ask a question out loud at normal volume levels and have somebody answer it vs. having to walk through a maze, schedule a meeting, or call a telecommuter at home.
It's all about instant communication. You need to tell somebody something, they're right there. You need to go over some specs, you give yourself a good shove and slide your chair over. How can that NOT be more productive that isolation.
When everybody is nearby it also turns into somewhat of a competition. I did 1200 lines today, how much did you do? I just fragged my 34th bug of the day.
.. productivity. I mean I'd love to work someplace that had a whore room! I' never go home.
what??
oh WAR room. nevermind.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Was it the war room mentality to create a site that doesn't work for shit with netscape browsers?
I went to the job posting on the corporate page, it askem to select stuff that did not appear on the page in netscape.
apparently somebody toosed out the idea that only MSIE user need power tools.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
here's a conference paper that has some of the ideas of the study...it is not merely limited to programmers though, but it is relevant and written by one of the authors.
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
How about common area, or the lab?
Given a select team, with access to the necessary materials, specifications and resources, while being allowed to control scope and the Hawthorne Effect, projects are done twice as fast.
Forgive me the soap box, but does this sound like projects you work on? In general specifications are ambiguous, the requirements unclear and access to the materials and people are often on a "when available" basis.
I hope my tax dollars did not pay for this.
Sorry, but good programmers who spend 1/10 of their day coding will outperform average programmers who spend 9/10 of their day coding every time. The way to increase productivity is to hire good programmers and give them the work environment to keep them there. The manager's job is to get the bullshit out of the way so the programmer can focus on what she does best. All the rest is touchy-feely nonsense.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Saddly .. thats not me, that would be the microsoft nazi's that controll our IT department. *NO UNIX FOR YOU!*
however .. i *DO* thank you for the ammunition, considering the person who wrote that page was REALLY trying to discredit me a few weeks ago because the new site has some problems with netscape 6.0.
*sigh* gotta love iis
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
Not to mention keystroke monitors, hidden microphones, and the random execution of anyone caught surfing inappropriate websites.
--
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
You may not agree, but that's how I see it.
You stated your position a little more reasonably; and I more or less agree with the content of your statement, but not the sentiment. You think that competition is a bad thing; I think it is a good thing.
With what would you replace competition? Who knows so much that they can pick the correct product/strategy/etc. at the outset? And are people so homogenous that they would be happy with a pre-ordained choice? Or are you thinking of some method of having choices in similar products somehow without competition?
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
- After some time people will feel comfortable with this new way and start to chat about non-working issues constantly which will drag other employees that would otherwise work into the debate. Have one such person and it destroys morale of whole team.
- Even if they will work more, they will soon feel tired and start to complain that they work too much. You can go on for 6 months, maybe longer, but then you will start to feel exhausted. The company will slowly start to lose their best employees. Since the best always leave first.
- The team work will make the best work more since the begginers will constantly ask some questions and ask for help. When you are let alone, you at least try to do something yourself, but when you have guru at hand, its so much easier to raise your head and fire a question.
Despite of this, I think this type of work can be used, but not constantly. In my opinion you can do 2 days a week some kind of workshop where all of the team work together and the rest of week close them in cubes. This would most likely serve pretty well.If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Not entirely true but that's still a common perception. The big bosses have big offices with windows and doors. The next level down is smaller offices with doors but no (or smaller) windows. Then there's cubes. Then there's people who sit at a table wherever a few feet of floor space open up. In the corporate world, the amount of space set aside for you as an individual is your status symbol.
If a company wants to move to this kind of environment for day-to-day work, I think they should take great care to make sure that the employees understand that they are still just as valuable as they always were. That could even require retaining individual office space so that the employees have a bolt hole - someplace they can go to work on those things that require privacy and concentration. A place to take calls from the wife/doctor/financial planner that don't work well in public. A place to hang pictures and stick dilbert strips to the door.
Having worked in several very fast-paced projects (mostly in .com startups) this has definitely proven to be very effective. IMHO, it all comes down to communication.
...) and very quick latency.
In a war room, direct interpersonal communication is easily available at all times. Advantages compared to technology aided communication of any kind are the very high bandwidth of communication (tone, body language,
Since people are in the same room most of the time, communication is always a multicast to all people related to the project. Using headphones, people that don't want to be disturbed can "filter" out such multicasts.
Sitting next to each other also makes social contacts very easy. People get to know each other. After a short while, they also feel a team spirit which shows in toys, t-shirts and common habits.
From my personal experience I can say that war rooms not only improve productivity, but make work a lot more fun!
holy shit that's funny!!!
LOL
___________________________
http://www.hyperpoem.net
hyperpoem.net
Hi,
We just (end of October), came out of a 2 month War Room based project. Normally we live in lil gray cubes. We had a hell of a schedule - 2 months to build a meta-search engine for prices of Books, Music and Video, that used a commercial data source for book music and video data, and dynamic scrapers to get prices.
Three of us went into the conference room, and we got it done on schedule (Books, Music and Movies)
Why ?
I don't think I could work in one of these 365 days a year - and I suspect that being THE SOLE War Room was kind of ego-boosting - if everyone was in one, who knows.
Also, you really have to be involved in a tight project, with the ability to tell anyone coming into the room to f*ck off if it disrupts you or is not relevant to the project. In a normal multi-person office, the day to day interrupts can drive multiple occupants mad...
Winton
p.s. There is also a similar article in the New Yorker this month (page 60, Dec 11 Issue).
Competition (between companies) isn't a problem. Cooperation (aka collusion) is a problem.
Competition gives you faster hardware, low-cost bandwidth, cheap long-distance service, and other nice things.
Cooperation/Collusion gives you MSFT OEM licensing agreements, the MPAA, the RIAA, price-fixing, etc. etc.
If I read swordgeek right, he's saying the same thing.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
The IBM Santa Teresa report 25 years ago showed the right way to build offices for software developers: private offices with a door and window. They need to be near common areas for meetings. This was later supported by Peopleware.
The big problem with the Santa Teresa design is that it is an optimal solution. Since no brain power goes into finding better solutions, it all goes into finding excuses for not implementing it.
These war rooms were only compared to "traditional offices", ie those dreaded cubicles.
This article also used an oxymoron: "private cubicle".
I've seen a lot of mention of the use of headphones as a way of combating distracting noise with music.
The problem with this, as outlined in Peopleware is that music engages the creative centers of the brain, resulting in work that is measurably less creative than if the work was conducted in a quiet environment.
My feeling with war rooms is that it is likely they work for short term projects where the quality and creativity of the result is not that important. Otherwise they are inappropriate.
This saved them many hours of coding the rest of the class had to sweat through, yet in the end their programs looked different enough to qualify as individual programs(at UNM you are not allowed to work on programs in groups in most CS classes) because they implemented the psuedocode separately.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
well you asked for it....
ITYM "ITYM "ITYM IANACP""
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
I've worked in a war room environment. I've worked in cubicle farms. I've worked where I even had my own (small, windowless) office.
My productivity is terrible in an environment where there are distractions. I just can't work attentively, I have a very hard time tuning out things going on around me.
Sometimes I want to listen to music on my headphones. Sometimes I want as near to silence as I can get (but not by stuffing plugs in my ears).
Yes, when I have more privacy there is more opportunity to surf, dawdle, etc, but when I have less privacy, I just get more watchful when I am dawdling.
What's awful is that, like any other hot management trend, it will get imposed on all programmers and all teams, because studies show "it works". And for political reasons it will either stick, in which case failure to show productivity gains will be blamed on something else, or it will become the scapegoat for failures whether or not it contributed.
But what will never ever happen is management treating each programmer, architect, designer, engineer, etc. like the unique individual he or she is.
Your 1001 and one ways as you put it, are seriously lacking in research. Let's tackle these one by one:
Keep a hetergeneous network . There's nothing more frustrating for your developers than having to learn 3 different environments, compile on 3 different platforms, and test on 3 different platforms. Pick one, and use it EVERYWHERE, without exception.
First, it's fairly understood by now that you mean homogeneous. Second, this is BS. You need the best machine for the best job. For example, I need a Unix machine for my CVS server. There really isn't a windows alternative. So now let's say we put our graphics artists on Unix machines. What would they do? They won't know where to start, what software to use, or even how to use the mouse! Conversly, let's standardize on Windows. Your artists can use this as most popular art software is available here. But what about your sysadmins? You just cut them off at the knees. They can no longer monitor the network or keep a proper firewall up.
The truth is, that modern day OSes communicate pretty well. It requires SOME forethought, but not much. The real hetrogeneous environments that cause all the headaches are when you have an old mainframe that all the PCs are trying to talk to. And what are you going to do about that? If you said move your mainframe to a windows box, then your boss should probably fire you right now.
Keep your developers on a short leash . It sounds like a bad idea at first, but think about it. Your best hackers all have low attention spans, and will tinker with anything that can be tinkered with. Don't give them root - anywhere - or you'll be faced with your best workers spending days at a time installing unneeded SCSI backup devices, tweaking quotas on the file servers, adding VPNs, WANs, and other unneeded "enhancements" right down to 200 various text editors, all for their own amusement. Your hackers should have normal user access to their machine, and NO OTHERS.
Rigggggghhhhht. Did you know that this is the best way to destroy your network? These people will see this as a challenge to their abilities and will do everything to circumvent your security. Along the way, they tend to 'accidently' destroy things because they really aren't as hot as they think they are.
The best thing you can do is have a more experienced individual take them under their wing. The more experienced individual will then direct the well intentioned efforts of the less experienced person into something actually useful. In other words, the former helps the later grow up. It works. Trust me, I've done it.
Train your administrators in house. Don't depend on their previous experience to do it for you. Admins are a dime a dozen these days; and most of them have learned bad habits from previous employers. You want to hire young admins, making sure that they've got several current certifications (MSCE, Oracle, Netware all have cert programs) to ensure that they're intelligent and have a desire to stay current. Bring them on board, and teach them YOUR way. No bad habits brought in, no bad habits learned, and *boom* instant administrator, just add paycheck.
Surprisingly, you're partially correct. In house training is the best thing you can do to bring useful programmers/admins in. However, certs are probably the worst way of identifing them. The guys who went to techinical school because they heard there's lots of $$$ in this biz, are the ones who have certs. The more honest, inquisitive type usually list personal experience and a desire to learn.
Keep everyone's code isolated. The less people that are mucking with critical sections, the better. Many hands in the pie create large messes and broken builds. If one person writes a critical section that they test and verify as working, don't break it by letting someone else add or tweak things that they didn't write, and therefore don't fully understand.
Weeelllll, yes and no. It is true that the person who wrote it has the best perspective on it. However, other people will most likely maintain it as the original programmer will not be available. The best solution is really a compromise. That compromise is to have one person own it at a time. The code can transfer hands as needed, but make sure that it is being passed to someone on a semi-permanent basis. This way, the code won't suffer shell shock going through every developer in the company.
One might ask though, "What if there is another person working who found a solution for a problem in code, but doesn't own the code?" The best solution in that case is to have the fix passed back to the owner, and have the owner migrate it. One again, it's something I've tried and it works.
Oh, one other thing. I've always wanted to try this on the moderators:
The preceding post is +5 informative material. Please mod it up as you know I'm right.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If I read swordgeek right, he's saying the same thing.
Then he's saying it poorly, or in a way that I'm failing to understand.
I agree with what you said. Unfortunately, the government during the FDR period rigged the laws of this land to favor collusion, condone monopoly, create and legitimize cartels, and weight things towards large interests in the name of "stability."
I would prefer a system that favors many smaller competitors, rather than a few large MegaCorps. I.e., I would prefer real capitalism to the government-by-pressure-group system that we currently have.
Along those lines, I would prefer the end of government-created and sustained monopolies, the busting up of cartels (like the banking industry), the limiting of patents and copyrights to shorter amounts of time as they once were, and either the inclusion of the "corporate death penalty" in law enforcement (i.e., corporations obey the same laws real people do) or the end of the corporation as we know it. Corporations used to be very special things, set up by the U.S. Congress and granted special legal status and exemptions. The Postal Service, for example. Private business was confined to being companies, not corporations.
This day of government licensing of all activity and "public-private partnerships" is really detrimental to capitalism, to our culture, and to our system of governance (a federal republic -- which is neither a democracy or a corporate state).
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
How can you not be more productive than the competiton after you've called out an agent orange strike on them?
Do not all go out together for a TexMex lunch.
It would have been interesting to see what the increased productivity was: more lines of code?
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
uh huh.
there is no thing
what else could you want?
and in fact the opposite is true in every point you made. Please tell us what company you are an overpaid dumdum manager in so we can all blacklist it from ever interviewing there. And what are you doing on slashdot anyway, shouldnt you be reading Business 2.0 and looking up all the big words?
I'm not sure how effective it really is even in the short run. I think just having 2 developers work together temporarily is more effective. I've worked in all conditions including war rooms, cubes and private offices. A private office is vastly superior most of the time. When the need arises, work in pairs. Cube farms and particularly war rooms are a form of indimidation and they work quite well; they intimidate people right out the door.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I'm sure most will agree with me that five lines of good code can be a hundred times better than five lines of bad code.
So, the question, for me, is this:
What the heck are these "commonly used measures of productivity in software development?" Is anybody aware of anything resembling an industry standard in this regard? I don't think anyone can honestly say that intensely heated debate will not ensue if we collectively tried to formulate a single definition of, and standard measure for, "productivity."
So, I have to take the results of this study with a large grain of salt...
--
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
And what are you doing on slashdot anyway, shouldnt you be reading Business 2.0 and looking up all the big words?
Oh, you mean big words like 'superscaler architechture' or 'gigaplex crossbar' or how about 'RPN calculators work via pushes and pops to a stack of a theoretically infinite size'. Or weren't those big enough words? Maybe 'distributed computing' or 'enterprise scalability' are more your forte? How about 'debugging core dumps' or 'flush the socket output stream'? (And yes, in case you were wondering, I am taunting you. You people can be downright fun.) :-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The studies did show that it worked on adults too. Supposedly the colors you see regularly actually do affect cognitive function. I don't believe it had any effect--just as many kids slept in class. But how do you test anything like that objectively anyway? (I know how it's supposed to be done, but I disagree that it can be done correctly) :)
Tim
We thought it ws pretty funny then and called them the mauve and teal 'learning' colors.
Well I worked in both environments and I can say one thing. For high demand, high production work, war rooms are the "only good one". But your boss should be on it... Or else it is not a war room but a barrack. Right now I'm working in war room "version 2". A not so big room (we're really stuffed here) with ten people and 15 computers. There is also the "no man's land" where all servers are located. You only enter there in case of trouble, maintenance "in situ" or to install something new. 24 hours a day there is always someone here. Most of us have computers at home and mobiles. This allows us to hold three ISP structures and a series of several other tasks for the University we work.
Our team is the best and most tighted together among all here. We passed over crises, problems of different kinds and till now many "old guards" are still working here, while they "officially" already left their job. Most decisions are considered and weighted by the team and only then a decision is taken. Frankly, we don't have "soldiers" here. There is only one trouble - music. Tastes are so different that it gets some conflicts here.
I should note that this team is a hallmark around here. While not being the biggest ISP, we are the most influential in terms of methods and technologies. One of the biggest ISPs is made mostly of our "old guards". And this structure has proved to be the best. The examples of "cubicle" schemes on this fiels and which I work with, had all failed. Specially due to the fact that there was no normal communication schemes between the boss and you.
In a work that demands the minimum of failures possible, the boss should not only be in contact with the team but also be an effective member of it. Yeah it is hard for some, any private/confidential talk is nearly known by all. But we are also decisiomakers so it does not make a big difference. It may also look hard to divide work between business deals and technical tasks. But this brings decisionmaking into a more strightforward position. The boss knows things as a captain should know the battlefield. This is very fundamental under the intensity of some tasks we have.
Good project teams = better productivity, and providing an environment where good teams quickly flourish, and bad teams quickly fall apart is the best way to ensure you have good teams.
Have a team go back to their respective cubes/offices/whatever after every meeting, and you can only judge at meetings.
Have the team in their own war-room, and you quickly know who's not a player.
A few comments:
Our management loved it, because it "improved communication" and "we never would have finished the product if we hadn't done it." I think this is a less than honest assessment. More precisely stated, it allowed them to avoid dealing with a complete lack of project management. The fact is, that even with the war room, the software was delivered 4 years late. (But if they keep saying it was a success long enough, the CEO and COO believe it and it becomes fact. And who cares about all those people who quit!)
There are certain people who thrive in the environment, but in my experience, they're less-experienced developers who would benefit more from a good mentoring program (which was sorely lacking). My observations are that you actually get productivity loss from the most skilled 20% of developers. In the aggregate and for the short term, this may pay off, because the middle 50% of developers see the bulk of the increase, offsetting other losses. To me, this indicates that the amount of benefit a company sees from a war room is proportional to the poor quality of their hiring practices and training programs. How dysfunctional is a company that sees an eight-fold increase in productivity due to a change in seating arrangements? Reverse it and think how you could make developers 8x less productive. There has to be some other stupid stuff going on at these shops.
Unfortunately for us, the skilled 20% are the ones most likely to leave. Turnover rates increased dramatically, from around 12% annually to 25% during this time. It's also not always the 20% teaching the other 80% and helping them--there's no law that says that only good practices are shared when everyone is face-to-face. In fact, hundreds of bad ideas are perpetuated even faster because of the "improved" communication. Ignorance breeds ignorance.
Face time certainly increases, which looks good to out-of-touch execs who focus on weekly overtime numbers as a measure of what they are getting for their engineering dollar. But it magnifies personnel problems. I've seen people put in 54-60 hours of face time in these situations because they're pressured into it, even though they're doing the same amount of work as when they were only working 40-45 hours.
Worst of all, the quality of our software suffered greatly from this practice. Just because more code appears to be getting slung, and OT goes up, engineering management feels it doesn't need to learn even the basics of software engineering practices. To wit, in the year after the war room effort ended, nearly 65% of the effort of engineering involved bug fixes. Put this in perspective: 4 years late, and after it was put into production, 2/3 of engineering dollars were spent correcting bugs introduced in the process. And yet they pronounced it a success!
We were clearly an SEI Level 1 shop during this time period, and it wasn't until we put away the folding tables and started treating developers like professionals instead of cattle that we actually saw any meaningful productivity improvement (meaning, factoring out the 2/3rds of the company now having to do bug fixes and support, the 1/3 actually met most of their projected targets. But of course, with no history of project management to compare to, the engineering management geniuses can still claim war room victory.)
And it sucks to constantly bang your knees on those damn folding table braces!
not really but.....
I work at a Ad shop called Centric. I'm in Web Development and we have a War Room setup. Basically everyone has a "L" shaped desk 10 feet wide and 3.5 feet deep at the skinny end and 4.5 feet wide at the big end. And we put them together facing each other. This is a good idea. I can look at anyone in the room and ask them a question without having to get up and walk around. This saves a lot of time. Getting help on JavaScript problems talks forver if I have to get, walk out of my cubical, walk to someone else's cubical and ask. Now I just shout "Do I put Document.Forms[0].regionID.selectedindex?" and someone can help. This is probably the best setup if everyone else is doing the same kind of work. The designers here are kind of old so they don't put up with the punk coders. Maybe because every hour or so everybody out back grabs their electric guitars and has a jam session.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Some while ago we had a group of eight people, who were assigned to the same project. We got a room with 5 computers and a telephone, without cubicles. Why only 5? Because we wouldn't all be there at the same time and some of us could work at home if we wanted.
When we were developing/programming it all went smoothly. People came in and worked and went away at times that suited them. Some working at home a lot, others at our room. In general 4 or 5 people were present at all times, enough for our computers. Only when we were having a meeting all were present.
Yes, we got our work done, but it was fun as well. We were never all programming. Always one of us was surfing around or playing a game to relax. To relax, we even played multi-player games from time to time. I think it actually improved our work. By playing games and seeing what others surfed to (and thus their interests) we got to know each other a lot better and working relation improved a lot.
Result was we got our work done playing a long the road. Another team worked, just worked without the playing. They weren't as loose around each other as we were and surely hadn't had as much fun!
--- Anyway, here's Aniway!
A few months back, my manager told me a story.
There was once an office manager for a medium sized company. Productivity was lagging, so it came down to him to help the problem. He decided it was time to change the lightbulbs. Changing the lightbulbs up 10 watts increased productivity 20% "Wow!" thought the manager. "What an increibly increase for just lightbulbs!"
So he decided to do it again. Up another 10 watts. Another 5% increase! "Excellent. By upping the wattages on the bulbs, i've gotten higher productivity." He tried it again, another 5 watts. Another 2% increase, but people were complaining about the lights. So he took it down those 5 watts. Yet another 2% increase in productivity.
Why?
It has nothing to do with the lights, it's the change. People need an engaging changing environment so that they do become stale, and can remain productive. War rooms probably provide that sort of dynamic environment, but most likely at the cost of high stress.
Maybe they should look into new light bulbs instead.
--jay
I seem to recall (Tho can't find info now) that idsoftware did this during when they were making Quake....
Aparently they were all mostly in their own offices, enjoying life after the success of Doom II and not really communicating during the devel of Quake. Things kept slowly rolling along until someone (Was it Carmack? or maybe one of the other owners) had all the office walls ripped down and then finnally they managed to work together and get the game finished...
I'm sure I remember seeing articles on this (Wierd?). Anyone else?
Jason
This concept has been around forever, they're just rehashing it and calling a catchy name. The Japanese have been doing this for years, come work here at Subaru with me, the president and ceo sit right next to you, there's no cubicles. Anywhere. Everyone in the company sits in quads facing each other and to deal with the noise we have a large open attrarium in the middle of the office with a fountain(creating white noise). To an extent the whole thing works great, but sometimes you need to concentrate on what you're doing (I'm the only programmer in my quad) and the others are going off on some fruitless argument. Of course this could be solved by changing company policy to allow earphones, but hell has frozen over yet soo...
But anyway, there's been many times when the open office concept has allowed my team to really kick some ass on some problems. You hear one guy talking about struggling with some problem, you butt in with "Oh yeah, I worked on that last week, it's like this..." Do to open communication you feel really connected to your team. But then again there's always the times where you want to shoot your co-workers too.
PS - An open office doesn't stop slackers or gossip freaks, they just get better at it, or just cease to care.
Peace,
Sotaku
yes, I was wondering, and wouldn't have realised if you hadn't told me. Put it this way, if Will Smith ever comes over to your house with a sack full of "your momma" jokes, just try to ignore him and sidle away.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
There's not enough material in the article to really draw any conclusions...I mean was the productivity for the same period or hour by hour? This just seems to reinforce the 'the more hours the better' idea.
If the payoff is really communication and collaboration do you have to do it by locking people in a big room for several months?
My experience has been that managers tend to treat each of their staff as a their personal staff member...ignoring collaboration and teamwork...Assignments tend to be: "Do this for me." If you collaborate with someone else it wreaks their discrete little world... "No, X is doing this...Y is doing that, I need you to do this..". Everything is broken down into pairwise interactions between the "team" member and the "team" leader.
In really bad places I've worked this is taken to the extreme. Managers only have confidence in one or two key people. They use the "hero" approach. Heros get the real assignments and everyone else gets something to make sure they stay out of the way. This ends up with about 90% of the staff severly pissed off and 10% meglomaniacs. The managers spend all of their time and effort either trying to swap dogs for heros or beating dogs and praising heros. You still get the high turnover as well. The meglomaniacs leave becasue they have beautiful resumes after a short time. The dogs leave becasue they are pissed off... However, the managers always seem to stay.
A big word that's very like 'superscaler' is 'superscalar'. I find it much more useful.
Too bad you could not put ALL the phones in there. Any ring is anoying. When will people stop using those stupid things except for emergencies? I hate it when people reach out and grab my attention like that. Even the awful Outlook, which interupts my typing, is better than the dying bird sound the phone makes.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Never defend the product
He believes that this is one reason why his small aerospace company has a consistently high safety record while turning out completely new (and often revolutionary) designs every year. You'll remember Rutan from the 1980's round the world non-stop plane Voyager II (I think).
Anyway, he said that if we start defending our work it becomes harder to find flaws and make necessary design changes. Cultivating a culture of healthy self-criticism frees a design team to make needed design changes. Finding flaws in somebody else's design isn't attacking them, but helping them. Reminds me of what I read a while back on the shuttle's SW development process.
I was immediately caught by this idea and wonder how much it would help quality in a software development environment.
Of course, the difficulty in convincing clients that you will NOT provide a mid-project QA report... I think he had comments an issue something like this too, but I forget...
Christopher
Mozilla
We have offices, but we also have project rooms where we can work together or hang out on the couches and design on the whiteboards, etc...
:)
The privacy and quiet of an office can be great sometimes, and it's needed for normal things like calling your kid's teacher (or surfing).
On the other hand, when communication is critical, lump everyone together and watch the productivity. Why choose one over the other when both have distinct advantages?
Dozer
"The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they're going to be when you kill them."
Dozer
"The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they're going to be when you kill them."
Well, let me try again here. You're both sort of getting what I mean, and at the same time, not quite. (I take full blame for not explaining myself clearly. :-)
Competition per se is a good thing, on the whole. However, it's fairly ruthless--companies (or individuals) go up against one another, and in the end someone wins and someone loses.
The best way to become a stronger competitor is to ally yourself with someone else. In other words (ironically enough), Competition leads to collusion.
At this point I should probably point out that I'm posting from Canada, which is definitely less of a free-enterprise capitalist country than the US is. That undoubtedly colours my opinions in some manner.
Also, I don't claim to be absolutely right about this, although I do believe it. Of course, I also think that all economic and political systems are inherently unstable, and won't last more than about a century at a time, so what do I know?
It's been an interesting discussion at any rate.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
"You are correct sir!" =DING= Wouldn't it be nice is /. had a spell checker so one didn't shoot themself in the foot? Ah well, guess it wouldn't give me anything to laugh at myself for. :P
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
mod that up, VERY on topic!
I would think that if more companies did this, we might see a lower turnover rate of technical employees. By forming groups, with comfortable and enjoyable work situtations, it would raise the 'cost' for a person to change jobs... they'd be leaving behind their comfortable work environment for a likely far less enjoyable one.
Peopld don't switch jobs when they're satisfied.
Raven
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
All political systems ARE inherently unstable. Dictatorships go broke and destroy themselves at the top via corruption and power struggles. Democracies last until the people vote themselves money. :)
The Byzantine Empire lasted 800 years with the same economic system, though; they were really strict about how money was to be handled. The penalty for debasing the currency (shaving gold coins in those days) was to have a hand cut off. Their currency was accepted the world over, even after the fall of their civilization.
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I was replying to the original post. "i agree" meant "i agree with AKAImBatman", the original "anonymous coward" was the dumdum. Oh well i suppose this makes me a dumdum too.
My last two jobs, I was expected to work alone most of the time, and put into a spare cube that was not being used at the time. I got incredibly bored and lonely, and my productivity suffered. I don't like cubicles the way they're done in most companies, I find them isolating.
While critics contend there is no privacy in a warroom, I contend there is no privacy in cubicles either. They're invariably arranged so your back is to the door and the monitor is facing the door, so your boss and cow-orkers can snoop on you without you noticing. You can also hear every speakerphone call, every nail clipping, every silly noise from every other cubicle, and every other cubicle can hear all the noises from your own cube.
At least in a warroom, all the cards are on the table. There is no privacy, but there is no false expectation of privacy in a warroom. The war-room does have the effect of encouraging communication and feedback, and removing isolation. My ideal work environment would be a war-room, plus private spaces for people to retreat to (probably be cubicles, but plush offices would be nice too :) I would prefer to arrange things so people are encouraged to work in the warroom 98% of the time - have all the good fast computers in the warroom, put crappy, barely-adequate-for-email computers in the cubes. Also put whiteboards, games, food, comfy recliners in the warroom so people enjoy the warroom and just go to their cubes when they need to do private stuff. Of course there are ways to screw up the warroom: make it too small, having a pointy-haired-boss hovering over people's shoulders, having nasty coworkers, etc.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
Where I work I am part of a 'Web Team'.
There are 5 of us, 4 of us are all in the same office (big office).
We are also pretty much segmented.. I'm the Web Apps Developer, we have a Gfx Artist, the 'Webmaster' who takes care about all the magerial overhead that comes our way, and a Training/User Rep who takes care of talking and training to all the users.
We seem to get more done simply becuase of the communication factor.. we can just tap the other guy on the shoulder and just say 'What did you call that form post variable again?'.
Sure we play UT as a group sometime, but we also get some interesting conversations going about 'What if we do this?' kinda stuff.. impropto meetings if you will.
Overall I think that we are more productive then if we just all lived in cubic's individually.
my $0.00000000002
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be