Coffee Meetings

Communication is essential for a project to be successful. Unfortunately, most people interpret this need as an excuse to reduce the rain forests by the production of mountains of memo's, reports, newsletters, charts, drawings, and so on. There are always alternatives. There is always another way of doing things. What we did was to all have a coffee break together at 10:00 and 15:00 where we would all stop working and gather round to discuss issues, progress, solve problems, and generally complain. Nothing became bottled up since there was always an opportunity to say your piece and they were very informal, sort of an 'unstructured stumblethrough'. After a while I felt that my presence was no longer needed and so I only attended if asked. As the project progressed the meeting died off until we felt the need for them again.

The second time round for the coffee meetings was when we were starting work on the coding of a module the designer would 'talk' the rest of the project team through her design. This made sure that everyone was aware of what was happening and any design errors were highlighted.

Anagrams

Of course, tannoy systems can be useful if used in ways to foster the ideas of teamwork and fun. Simon Bentley, the co-inventor of Mongle Fongle III (more of this later), was the subject of a different tannoy message every day for several
weeks each one an anagram of his name;

By Mine Not Les
Sly Teen In M.O.S.
Ben's Tely In Mi
Teeny In Sloms
Ben's Tiny Elmo
Been, Not Slimy M
Money B. Silent
Melons Be Tiny

Culminating in this piece de resistance of Tannoy art;


"Would SLIMY BENT ONE please contact reception."

P.S. What is the 'Owls' all about?

Tannoys

Tom De Marco and Tim Lister in their book Peopleware attack the use of Tannoy announcements because they interrupt the work of , say 100 people, for the benefit of one person, I agree but....

THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO SKIN A TANNOY!

I worked in a company who thought it was more important to locate someone than not to disturb people while they were trying to work, which brings us to another law;;

THORPE'S LAW OF LOUD ANNOUNCEMENTS

The law states that the number of people disturbed by an announcement is inversely proportional to the seniority of the person being paged; that is, the person who causes the maximum disturbance is the janitor! Why not buy him a pager.

I solved the problem as it affected my team. One Saturday when we were working I took a screwdriver, wire cutters and a step ladder in to work (I could have asked the janitor for these items but no one could ever find him), took the loudspeaker that was in our area out of the ceiling, disconnected the wires and the replaced it to cheers from the rest of the team. No one, other than us, ever discovered that it had been disconnected, but we smiled every time we heard the muffled sounds of loudspeaker messages coming from other parts of the building. This the kind of guerrilla warfare that teams often engage in to get their own way.