Around 20 years ago, the software development industry created a manifesto to
streamline product development. This manifesto resulted in many frameworks
that were adopted by the IT industry. Over the years, this became a buzzword
that signals change in ways of working across different industries like Banking &
Finance, Consumer Good to develop products faster.
This Agile way of working typically requires small teams to work in close contact
with each other, a flat hierarchy and constant communication. If implemented
correctly, the Agile manifesto can fundamentally change the structure of the
organizations. This in turn has numerous spatial implications in the way offices are
designed to accommodate these behaviors.
Steelcase’s IT Team at Grand Rapids, Michigan is agile, and the company has been
studying their usage patterns in the office. They have also been testing their new
range of furniture called flex on these teams. As India is culturally, behaviorally
and economically extremely different to North America, it became imperative to
see how organizations in India are changing.
During the course of this project, I got in touch with various scrum masters and
professionals actually implementing this framework and attended Agile meetups
every weekend to hear candid accounts of the scenario in India. This helped to
narrow down on a few organizations that stood out in terms of their practices. I
then visited the workplaces of these companies to see firsthand how they were
working and using their spaces.
Space, Furniture, Design, Agile, Interior
