A personal blog post from our Director of Consultancy Projects
As well as delivering products, OCC has a team that specialises in custom software development; they are behind the wide variety of case studies on our website. This combination of teams working on custom software and product development & support is, I think, unique.
Once a year I take the custom development team out for a day to discuss how we might write even better software. This time we crossed the road to the Jam Factory for an open discussion and some prepared talks. The talks were:
- A toolkit for establishing better experience for our users
- The judicious use of Agile project management
- A critical look at SOLID principles
- Lessons on testing from the product development team
The result was a surprise to me. The conclusion of the team was that best way to improve our performance was none of the above but instead improving the office environment. Nothing to do with software at all. The team wanted fewer interruptions, less multitasking and more time to quietly think through difficult technical problems.
I was surprised and really interested in the conclusion. Our office is already considered calm and quiet. So we’re going to try a few new things. We’re going to experiment with collaboration tools that allow people to raise a “Do not disturb” flag. We’re using instant messaging that reduces disruption, hosted within OCC to keep the data confidential. I’m encouraging staff to book rooms or work from home during intensive design phases. It’s going to be interesting to see how we get on.
