You can better understand this article:

Spotify mode: Spotify is the second largest foreign music media website after Pandora. In the process of expanding from 6 people to 1200 people, it adopted a brand-new agile matrix organization to expand: tribes, detachments, clubs and associations.

The team is like a small startup. They sit together and have all the skills and tools needed to design, develop, test and release products. They are a self-organizing team and decide their own working methods-some use Scrum sprint, some use kanban, and some use a mixture of these methods.

Each team has a long-term task, such as building and improving Android client, creating Spotify radio experience, expanding back-end system or providing payment solutions. Most teams have a large workspace, including a desk area, a rest area and a private "group" room. Almost all the walls in the workspace are whiteboards. Each team can also find a scrum master to help them improve their work style.

Waterfall and Agile: Making plans together and then implementing them separately by all departments are the working methods that many companies will adopt. This working method is called "waterfall" working method, but it has some shortcomings, such as low efficiency. Once one link gets stuck, the whole plan will be postponed, and this method can't cope with unexpected situations. Scrum is an incremental iterative development process that can be used to develop and maintain complex products. The whole development process consists of several short iterative cycles, each cycle is 2 to 4 weeks. In Scrum's workflow, a communication meeting will be held every day of the sprint cycle, so that teams can grasp each other's progress, understand what will slow down and provide timely support.

Curtis Steiner: At present, he is a senior product manager in DeliveryHero.Com. He has worked for HelloFresh, BBC, Atos, etc. The article is only for personal learning and communication, and the copyright belongs to the author.

In the pursuit of "Agile", many companies ignore a simple step, which is to create a collaborative physical space for R&D teams.

The environment will affect our behavior, both inside and outside the workplace. Companies are usually committed to agile, but they have not created the physical environment needed to cultivate agile. By creating agile areas, you can open a new world of problem-solving and interaction potential, which helps to promote decision-making.

Agile space is nothing revolutionary. This is just an area adjacent to the R&D team's desk, where there are whiteboards, seats and necessities for agile work, and R&D teams can get together for collaboration and discussion.

This space is not a panacea for all problems, but it is a very important part to ensure that your R&D team has enough space to interact away from their desks. We find this effect very valuable.

In this article, I want to explore the agile space through these three parts:

L create the value of agile space

L how do we use agile space

L some skills of establishing agile space

At that time, I didn't realize that agile space was one of the themes that Spotify involved in their engineering culture (now affectionately called "Spotify mode"). They call this space "lounge", which is one of the aspects that are rarely discussed, and many organizations tend to ignore it when trying to copy Spotify mode.

Spotify's "lounge" is on the left. This is a part that their learners often ignore.

What happens when the R&D team doesn't have a suitable workspace? Most of us will use the conference room by default. But there are two problems:

1. There is no available meeting room.

2. The meeting room is not suitable for most forms you need (brainstorming, innovation, conceiving meetings, architectural design, cooperation).

Agile Workspace in Use

1. Missing meeting room.

It seems to be a universal fact that there will never be enough meeting rooms in an organization. Whenever you try to have a meeting with some colleagues or teams somewhere, the only space available is a room for four people in two weeks. Unfortunately, the unavailability of conference rooms has the annoying effect of delaying decision-making, which may bring huge opportunity cost loss. Finally, the discussion unnecessarily waits for discussion space.

2. Layout of meeting room

Even if you can find conference rooms, they are not set up to promote agile team interaction. What worries me most is that the big table occupies the center of the room. It distracts participants and leads to a form that is usually the opposite of the type of environment you need when trying to split and solve complex problems.

This kind of meeting is also considered less useful than what the team could have done. I think this is because the team adapts the meeting style to the meeting room, not to the meeting room. This meeting form, I mean the format of the meeting room leads to a demonstration (one-to-many) meeting, which is not suitable for a truly independent product research and development team.

Our agile workspace plan. In fact, there are many white boards at your fingertips next to the workspace of our R&D team.

Using agile workspace

We finally use agile space for R&D team interaction outside the most important ceremony. Every morning, our R&D team will stand here, and after that, most of the day will be used by different R&D teams in the department.

What we find most valuable is that the space creates opportunities for different types of work meetings-it may be a discussion among engineers about different construction methods, a new design of the demolition team, training or a small seminar. The openness and flexibility of the space help the R&D team solve problems in different ways.

By working and communicating around the whiteboard, you will get better output. In my opinion, the most valuable thing after having agile space is continuous "small training". The R&D team no longer tries to train and evaluate only at the weekly meeting, but begins to solve problems in smaller and more concentrated parts. I have noticed that the benefits of doing this are that we have reduced rework, improved publishing speed and improved documentation.

Agile space is not only used for engineering tasks. Print the design so that people can add notes and dots, so that your R&D team can get feedback quickly and clearly. Members of the R&D team collided in their thoughts during the communication. When you stand in a circle, you feel more natural than when someone is talking at the conference table. Besides, we are lucky that our space is open. This encourages the participation of other passers-by and promotes dialogue that might not have happened otherwise.

R&D team works independently in agile space. These photos were taken in the early days of agile space, so they look a little sparse. After trying this space, we added sofas, carpets, benches and bean bags to make the space more attractive!

Another advantage is that smaller conversations will be moved there instead of stopped at the desk, which will reduce the noise and interference to those colleagues who are working in depth and benefit everyone.

Finally, you can use this space to create a "demonstration stage". This is where the R&D team in Agile Space studies the latest version of the prototype, and anyone can follow up your work.

This space shouldn't be ......

Anyone can work freely in agile space, but it has never been considered as a "quiet" space for in-depth work. It is also not a place for group work and discussion, and it is not suitable for conversations between 1 and 1, because there are many places in the office where such conversations can be held.

We also continue to use ordinary conference rooms for classification, evaluation, review and planning. We made this decision because those rooms are more suitable for meetings-there are large monitors and video conferencing tools, and everyone has enough seats.

Some Skills of Introducing Agile Workspace

Finding space-in the process of our company's sustained and rapid development, finding a seat for everyone has always been a challenge, so the suggestion of moving a whole row of tables didn't get a warm response at first. However, by providing an agile workspace for the R&D team to test the concept, we can estimate the MRH (conference room time) saved. For a fast-growing company, the opportunity to vacate the conference room that has been oversubscribed is very good. I hope you can also use some of the benefits highlighted above to publicize your situation!

Agile space must be close to the desk of the R&D team-the key to a successful agile workspace is to be close to the R&D team. If the space is on a different floor or on the other side of the building, it is not so effective because the R&D team will not use it at all. Ideally, you can find a place to use it at the table of the R&D team.

Excellent product designers surrounded by whiteboards

Whiteboard or magic paper-Luckily, we have many whiteboards available, so we start with four. However, if your budget is tight, you can use whiteboard paper to turn any wall into a whiteboard to achieve the same effect.

Where to sit-When we create an agile space, we realize that we need seats. Sometimes we work around the whiteboard, and sometimes we discuss and explain. Too much work will consume a lot of brain power, so at least give your R&D team a break. The administrative R&D team in our office is excellent. After our initial attempt, they arranged sofas, benches, folding chairs, bean bags and even a carpet to make the office space more comfortable.

Keep the materials at hand-there is no point in creating such a space if it takes 10 minutes to find post-it notes, whiteboard pens and paper. Prepare a drawer for agile work so that you can directly start the task at hand.

No appointment-this is not a conference room, and "appointment post-it notes" (my most annoying thing) are invalid! This space should be open to all teams and their members at any time. You can arrange some things in this space at a specific time, but this does not prevent others from using it equally.

Whiteboards are not permanent-this is my personal idea of all whiteboards that don't belong to the R&D team, but this is not what we started to do in the agile field. Once you leave the whiteboard, others can use it freely. Be sure to take pictures and wipe them clean when you use them. If you see something on it when you arrive, you can post a photo on Slack, such as "# Agile Space Whiteboard", to ensure that your knowledge will not be lost.

Encourage multiple R&D teams to use it-the reality is that few companies leave enough agile workspace for each R&D team. At first, it was considered as only an area of our R&D team, but it was also used by other R&D teams. Interestingly, we find it beneficial to increase knowledge sharing and establish relationships in the organization. Finally, we often hold meetings with key business partners in the agile workspace, which makes them feel more like members of the R&D team and lets them know how we work.

This space was used for a whole week to push the design work forward. Fortunately, most of the required resources already exist. Although this sprint shows the flexibility of this space, in hindsight, we should not monopolize it for a week.

conclusion

We found that by creating this space, we can meet more frequently and have a smaller and more focused conversation. The openness and flexibility of the space encourage us to try different types of meetings, which are more useful and improve the participation of the whole R&D team. It may be difficult to find a place to create this lounge that breaks the conventional pattern that most of us are used to, but changing your organization requires more than renaming the team as an R&D team and using Gila-it needs space and environment to support your operation mode, so invest in Agile Workspace!

Source: Create space for agile work. Medium. (2020). It was retrieved on May 7, 2020 from/swlh/making-space for-agile-working-c83835dcb3e 3.