How is your physical environment affecting your productivity?

We'd just moved the group downstairs to an open plan team area. They had spent the last 4 years in cubicle farms and we'd unceremoniously kicked them out and thrown them into a massive room with a few trestle tables and whiteboards covering the walls. Now that I reflect on it, they probably expected the white walls to be padded.

There were two of us standing near the storyboard surveying the room, and my colleague quipped "Wow, It's so quiet in here you can hear the waterfall".

Which reinforced several things to me:

Just because you do certain things it doesn't make you agile. Having a daily stand-up, a story board and an open plan environment are not by themselves agile. It's the behaviors that those techniques encourage that is important. Be careful of falling into the mechanical agile trap. 

So what is it about having an open plan environment that supports an agile implementation?

1. Communication boundaries are reduced. This seems obvious, but the very tools that have made communication more efficient can be mental barriers to open communication and collaboration. Not picking up the phone, Not leaving the cubicle, knocking on the closed office door, writing the email instead of having the conversation. These are all relatively minor barriers that inhibit the flow of shared information. In an open floor plan you can share information and make decisions faster because everyone is right there.

2. Learning through Osmosis: I've lost count of the amount of invaluable things I learnt purely by overhearing conversations around me. Useful things. Hearing a developer walk a tester through changes or a Product owner sitting with a Tester as they describe use cases. As a project manager - that's all invaluable.

3. Transparency: There literally is nowhere to hide. You can see everything that's going on.

There are obviously cons as well when not implemented correctly. For some people it's really hard to get into the "flow" because it's hard to concentrate, I find that most people usually adapt within a few iterations and get used to working in such environments. 

A warning though - make sure the teams you have seated near each other make sense. They had once moved our development team next to the first level support team for another product. There was very little useful cross pollination going on and everyones productivity was impacted. 

There's a much better article here:

http://www.logigear.com/magazine/agile/proposal-for-an-open-work-space/