Is collaboration always productive?

I was at a meeting hosted at co-working space where I was suddenly struck by something. For a set fee a month, you get to use the co-working space in an open plan area. Walking around there, I saw a lot of people staring fixedly at their screens with their headphones on. This didn’t strike me as terribly collaborative or productive.

Developers like to tune everyone else out to focus on the problem at hand. You need to see the code, the more spiritual might even say feel the code, though I feel that’s a bit of the usual fluffy claptrap really. It’s about getting into the zone, and making sure you stay there so that you are productive. Being in an open plan office isn’t really conducive to that. You are constantly being bothered by interruptions; by people moving past your eye line, it’s loud. Thus, you see a lot of people with their headphones on trying to concentrate; this does seem to be completely at odds with what’s intended to be a collaborative space. You aren’t collaborating and you’re not as productive as you would be in a dedicated environment.

If you truly expect your team to be productive; then you have to make the office space fit your team; not some idealised vision of what a office should be. While it might look quite cool in pictures, having bean bags in the office is never a good idea. My entire team is distributed so we all work where we need to work, sometimes that’s in the office, most of the time it’s from home and we communicate over IM and VOIP. When we all choose to be in the office, that’s when we collaborate, I don’t try and force collaboration on the team. Even so, the office area is still very sparse; we just have a couple of big whiteboards on the wall. It’s quiet to the point of silence, but we schedule regular breaks where we collectively go for coffee, and this is when we start the collaboration process; sometimes moving back into the office to use the whiteboards.

When you’re building a product, at some point talking about what the product is has to give way to actually building it. An office space that favours interruptions isn’t going to help you do the work. Sometimes being left alone is what’s needed

Here’s to a productive day

Lewin

@quotidianEnnui

Image link: http://twitpic.com/dj27dh

How do you integrate?

A manager of mine used to ask the interview question: when you join a new team, how do you build your credibility? I use it to this day. If the answer is, “ask questions about the person in the team and find out how you can help them”, I know I have the right person.

As Tech Talkfest grows and the ‘team’ of members gets larger, the question may well be “when you meet a group for the first time, how do you integrate yourself?” This is a question most people can answer but they are often on the lookout for better ways to do it.

Lewin Chan – Chief Architect at Adaptris

Lewin Chan, Chief Architect at Adaptris Ltd, approaches software integration in the same way. Although Lewin is what we would understand as deeply technical, because of the solutions he provides, he needs to understand the challenges of the businesses that his clients run and therefore needs to get the best from people. This begins with the question, how can I help you achieve the outcome you want?

He manages these outcomes, often under time pressures. In the words of Bill Pugsley: “Lewin made a significant contribution to the re-engineering of the core product suite that our business offered to our clients. Working closely with our Technical Director he met the onerous timescales that I unreasonably demanded!

He posts regularly in his blog: Specialising Generalist, Integration isn’t always easy but it’s never hard, discussing integration in ways that people can understand. If you want a simple explanation of software integration, you can start here – What is integration? 😉 His blog posts on other topics are just as informative.

On a very basic level, integration is getting 2 different systems to talk to each other. How is this not like 2 people meeting for the first time, but speaking different languages. What do you do, as perhaps a native French speaker meeting a native Japanese speaker? How do you integrate yourself? You try and find common ground, on the simplest level you start with a smile. As Sri Sri Ravi Shankar quotes: “All the people in the world smile in the same language.”

Many people do struggle with walking into a room full of people already talking, of being a stranger in a new place. How do you integrate yourself?

I deal with it by turning up early, if you are one of the 1st people there, you get to meet 1 or 2 people in the same situation, always easier!

Lewin is one of Tech Talkfest’s founding members, if generosity and helping people are some of your values, you can get in early and help build our network and get to meet Lewin at one of our events. He knows how to integrate, what you see is what you get!