
On the Floor
Office Awareness
When it gets busy in the office (and it's always busy in the office) it's easy to lose track of what your fellow workers are working on. Forming ad-hoc teams to work on projects - a great way to get things done and promote project ownership - also causes isolation.
When you run into this situation, it's frustrating. Not all teams are prioritizing projects in the same way, and what's super-important to you might be bottom of the list for someone else. What's the best way to route around this kind of workflow block?
We use a number of methods to try to make sure everybody's on the same page; whether it's for scheduling, workload, current availability, and so on.
- Once a week we have meetings with all high-level stakeholders: what's going on with your teams, trouble spots, etc. This is the time to talk about strategy and the basic business of keeping the company running. This is the high-level overview: it's good to take a step back from the work itself and look at the bigger picture.
- Project teams meet multiple times over the course of the project - whether to discuss initial direction, clarification when the project moves from, say, static mockups to a functioning site, and more. This is mid-level management: making sure everyone involved with the project knows the details and shares the same overall vision.
- Whiteboards: get them, love them. Each team within the office has their own big board to track projects, their status, who's responsible and other pertinent information. It's easy just by glancing across the office to see how busy each team is and what they're up to. This is the bottom-level organization - physically keeping tabs on what's going on.
Through a combination of these different levels of management, everybody in the office usually has a pretty good idea of what's up - they have office awareness. More than raw ability or skill, it's this awareness, of being embedded in a larger system, that truly makes an office work smoothly.
February 16 2010 at 12:32PM
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