Close Quarters, No Privacy--Just the Thing to Boost Productivity

A newsroom is a place where you jam a lot of sensitive people into a crowded space, work them like firefighters and expect them to still be creative. At first blush, it doesn’t seem like it would work.

But new research shows that not only does that setting lend itself well to collaborative and creative efforts, it can actually increase productivity.

This revelation didn’t surprise researchers at the University of Michigan.

Working with software developers at Ford Motor Co., the researchers found that productivity rose by two to four times when the developers were kept in a “war room” and compelled to work closely together.

Not only that, the clients--or the end users of the software--were in there with them, looking over their shoulders all the time to be sure that what they were going to get was what they needed.

It turns out that there’s no substitution for yelling over your shoulder at a colleague when a problem arises.

The “war room” approach to problem solving is not new. Known by names such as “dedicated project rooms” or “skunkworks,” the concept has been used for everything from weapons development to product design, and it is making serious inroads into the software industry.

Ford, which recently completed a new building with about 114 war rooms, wondered how successful it would be with software developers. So the company turned to Stephanie Teasley, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Michigan who specializes in the study of how people work in collaborative settings.

“It’s well established that if you collaborate with people, as you get farther and farther away, the less likely you are to collaborate,” Teasley said.

If the project involves several people working on common problems, it makes more sense to put them in the same room instead of leaving each participant isolated in a private office, her research shows.

The war room she used for her research is basically a large room with desks around the perimeter and a common work space in the middle.

“The idea is you are immersed in the environment of your team, and you can easily keep track of what’s going on with everybody else,” she said. “You can tune in and tune out as you are overhearing bits of conversation.”

If you hear someone talking about a problem and you have a potential solution, it’s easy to “chime in and add your two cents’ worth,” she said.

That approach “has a lot of merit,” said Steven Poltrock, a leader in collaboration technology at Boeing’s advanced research and development division in Seattle.

Workers “have immediate access to all the other members of the team, and they can pass their ideas back and forth,” Poltrock said.

Teasley studied six teams over several months. The first team turned out to be twice as productive as similar groups that were not housed in war rooms, she said. Productivity was determined on the basis of standardized measurements of the difficulty of the project and the time it took to complete it.

Concerned that the first team may have been handpicked because its members were more suitable to such an atmosphere, she moved on to other, more randomly selected teams and got even more significant results. In some cases, the teams were four times more productive.

There had been some concern that workers would balk at such a setting, feeling a need for privacy in order to concentrate on their work. Some did express apprehension in the beginning, Teasley said, but at the end of the project they reported they were “less distracted” by co-workers and were “pretty satisfied with the experience.”

Boeing’s Poltrock said that approach is limited at the aerospace giant because of the scale of the projects.

“An airplane program will involve more than 10,000 people,” and it isn’t possible to cram them all into one room, Poltrock said. But the company places an emphasis on “co-location,” especially early in the project.

Because much of the work on a new airliner is farmed out to other firms scattered around the world, Boeing brings key personnel to its facilities during the early stages of development. “They will work with us for a period of months until they have gotten through the earliest parts of design work,” Poltrock said.

But collaboration continues even after they return to their home bases. Digital mock-ups enable workers scattered around the world to work simultaneously on related problems, checking, for example, to see whether the part they are designing will fit where it’s supposed to.

The Boeing 777 was designed entirely with digital models and was the first commercial airplane that was completely designed without a physical mock-up.

But the success of the program, Poltrock said, stemmed in large measure from the personal collaboration between key personnel early in the project.

“When people are getting the project off the ground, establishing the blueprint and the expectations, that’s the time when people really need to be pretty tightly coupled,” Teasley said. “You need to be on the same page.”

Anticipating that no one size fits all, the new building at Ford features “neighborhoods” of war rooms where multiple teams can work together on similar problems, while allowing flexibility and privacy as needed.

One thing that emerged in the research is that team members took a dim view of fellow workers who spent too much time outside the war room.

“People expected you to be there if you were participating in the project,” Teasley said.

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Lee Dye can be reached by e-mail at leedye@gci.net.