Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

We managers love our offices. They are a symbol of permanence and sanctuary in a tumultuous world. It's hard to imagine giving them up.  But I did give mine up, three years ago, and I've never looked back.

For 15 years at Sun, I had an office and I mostly loved it dearly. When I lived near Boston, I decorated the walls in my office floor to ceiling with paper money from around the world and my monitor for my Sun386i workstation and later my SPARCStation 10 sported colorful plastic cartoon characters and lots of other exotic decor. It was my home away from home. I had desk space and a fast network. What could be better? Except that it was expensive and time consuming. For Sun, there was the cost of real estate and facilities, and for me there was the cost of the commute (about 1,100 hours over the years).

And then there were the office moves: In Boston alone, I moved offices four times, and all of the files and decorations followed. Then I relocated Mountain View, California, and it got worse: I moved to Building 19, the building 18, then building 21 (now Google and Intuit neighborhoods), then up to Menlo Park building 17... at which point I stopped unpacking boxes because it was just all too much. Then I moved over to manage the java.sun.com web site, which was down in Cupertino, California, where I moved another 3 times just between various Cupertino buildings and floors. We actually had people who wasted time commuting in the middle of the day to different Sun campuses in the Bay Area so that they could attend meetings. And then to Colorado, where I live now, and did three more office moves.

A lot of the moves were intended to achieve group proximity: It's well known that groups work best together if team members are within easy reach of one another, and can pop their heads in or have a quick hallway conversation and quickly collaborate in real time. But what if your team networks with hundreds of other people, who are scattered across time zones? What if the best people for a job don't work in your city? What if you don't want your team wasting time in traffic every day? With a distributed team, the model changes: It's more important to build capabilities for personal networking and collaboration than it is to have a group physically co-located in one place. Proximity in our group is now achieved via IM, electronic storyboards, and quarterly in-person collaboration meetings.

Now, almost our entire Sun.com design group works from home or from reserve-it-when-you-need-it offices in our "flex" system. Our group summarized their experiences last year in these blog postings:

• Design from Anywhere: What People Love
• Design from Anywhere: Pitfalls
• Design from Anywhere: Best Practices

As a manager, it was once pretty difficult for me to imagine not walking around and peering over the shoulders of the folks in my team every day. But that's not really good management. Good management instead is about leading your teams to network effectively with co-workers and customers in order to produce great products. You don't need a permanent office to ensure that the right kind of networking is happening; you just need a network.

So, managers, do you really need your office?

My office at home:

Tunes: 43: Absinthe Blind - Walls Covered In

Technorati Tag: Web-Design

Technorati Tag: Design