Ideas about teams and collaboration based on experiences at 37signals.
Jason's identifying all of the ways people have criticized the ideas 37signals had about teams and collaboration.
Most of the topics are on par with Getting Real.
Red Flags - raised by people who work close to one another and occur more on large projects. These words make a project go bad, late, over budget. 4 letter words that can be red flags:
- Need
- Can't
- Easy
- Just
- Only
- Fast
Team size should be small, 2 is good, if you need more then your doing to much. Keeping a team small means your doing the important things first. Works expands to fill the time available.
Collaboration is Communication - Keep your team apart. Jason's talking about bringing David to Chicago and how that was bad for production. Interruption is the enemy of production. Comparing R.E.M. sleep to production. When you in the Zone is R.E.M. work. Less interruption leads to more R.E.M work and more production.
Doing things in the work place like different hours, working from home, not talking after 1pm. Stay away from one another. Use passive collaboration to get things done vs active collaboration.
Get rid of the "Open" floor plan.
Meetings are toxic. Meetings are Costly. Number of people times time of meeting equal total loss of time for productivity. All meetings are optional. Meetings break-up the day and create small work times which can't be very productive. Not enough time to get into the Zone. Make your meeting attendees stand during the meeting, the get anxious and get done faster. Avoid meetings by making very smaller decisions. Judo. Progress helps moral. Small decisions are easier to fix than large decisions.
