Centralize Meeting Rooms
Centralize Meeting RoomsAntiPattern Type: Organizational
Problem: Too many meeting rooms scattered about the place, no-one knows who's doing what where. And someone in Admin is bored and needs something to organize.
Forces: Big building, the meetings have become the entirety of most people's project work. Big stodgy meetings are chewing up time as is the going from one meeting to another.
Supposed Solution: Centralize the meeting rooms. One of two ways. Put them all in one place, or just centralize the bookings of them. Make sure you pick some scheme for booking them that involves a) LotusNotes or b) OneUniquePerson? doing the management.
Resulting Context: If you physically move all the meeting rooms to one place, they'll end up isolated. People won't go and find a free room, they'll just have loud meetings or speakerphone conferences in the open plan offices where people are also trying to think. If you don't, you'll need to number the rooms with some complex scheme, which ensures no-one knows which room to be in.
If you centralize the bookings, you get a unique point of failure for the system; the OneUniquePerson? can be off, LotusNotes is a pain to work. And, if you couple this with NoOffices, people just book rooms. They'll book a room all day every other day just in case they need to have a meeting - in essence, co-opting a meeting room as their office.
Examples in Practice: The Futures Exchange in London moved their meeting rooms to a cluster the other end of the building. Getting there from engineering involves leaving the Futures Exchange into a common lobby, walking down the building, swiping back in again to the other exchange-specific bit and then wandering through a maze. Funnily enough no-one bothers because it takes 1/4 hour to physically see if a room is free, and about the same to check notes and even then you still don't know if the room is ACTUALLY free and so meetings happen at a spare desk in the open plan office.
-- KatieLucas
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(last edited December 14, 2014)
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