As my holiday comes to an end I was stricken with a thought. Recently, we decided to reorganise the office to make better use of space. We moved management and support into the [overly sized] Wii room, put the Wii in the little office and tried to move developers, architects and BAs around the main room. And we ran into distribution problems – how do we group people so they’re near who they’re working with?
My brainwave tonight is we’re looking at this in entirely the wrong way. Why tie people to a desk as such? The architects and BAs have laptops, and terminal services means the desktops can be accessed from any other PC. Hence, why not have a series of hot-desks (horrible as the term may be), and let people move as the day dictates?
Of course you’d need somewhere to stash your gear, possibly another room in some people’s case. But it would solve the grouping problem, and would allow repositioning based on preferences of the day (heat, noise, proximity to people).
Of course, we’d need to get our evil WiFi stable first. Joys of a shared office, 802.11 networks for Africa.
