Last week I wrote about eliminating my email backlog. I'm sitting in the Lean Design and Development conference (unfortunately no Wi-Fi so I'm posting this in the evening). One of the three featured speakers this morning was Takashi Tanaka. He's been talking about the use of Oobeya (or "big room" also referred to as "open space" in English). An oobeya is in common parlance a permanent "war room" for a product development project. The walls are lined with all the design information and all the status information. In order to know anything about the project all stakeholders are encouraged to visit the oobeya. Just like my Architecture Control Board, the information on the walls is the master copy and the design and project tracking information of record. Takashi reports that one team who introduced oobeya reduced their email from 200 per day to 50 within one week and after full institutionalization of the idea, team members reported that email had fallen to a range between 1 and 20 per day. Wow! Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Lean, Oobeya, Open+Space

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