Spaces

Spaces

As organisations continue to evolve their processes and become increasingly connected, the boundaries between the parent organisation and their extended supply relationships becomes increasingly blurred. The level of interaction with "just in time" information becomes ever faster and places greater demands upon staff within their workplaces. Layering in on top of this is greater compression of available time, making our efforts to remain focussed, organised and yet balanced, increasingly difficult.

One of the emergent discussions in a knowledge enabled economy is the role of the workplace in fostering effective exchanges and providing supportive, attractive and enabling work environments, whilst managing the sustainability impacts of rapid change. The Knowledge Management community in Europe have been able to provide some interesting insights to the debate so far, but there is still much work to do. Within organisations, much of the explicit information held by people is represented within their information systems, or hardcopy manuals, with the usual issues associated with storage, retrieval, update and disposal of that information. However, how are organisations able to track and monitor the information they are increasingly likely to need to know? How can they structure the modern workplace to effectively take account of this increased need for agility, and the need to sift meaning out of what at first appears to be chaos?

When faced with organisational complexity and demanding workloads, how can workplaces be structured to provide for the degree of agility required in todays economy? How can they achieve some measure of sustainability in doing so, when enormous change generates so much waste and redundancy? How can we avoid the patterns of generation of excessive waste by poor design?

These are some of the questions we ask at Laughing Mind, and use when working with organisations to develop more agile workspaces that allow them to respond to the demands of business today, whilst preparing for the business of tomorrow.

Case studies

Wiki-enabled Project Workspaces: a large part of our recent work is in assisting our clients with establishing and fine-tuning wikis as a collaborative, highly productive workspace. Using our experience in Project delivery with Atlassian products (Confluence and Jira), we have been doing a lot of work establishing Project Workspaces that draw together the strengths of PRINCE2 Project Management methods with the agility, transparency and connectedness of Enterprise 2.0 toolsets. This has resulted in fast project ramp-up, supported by effective dashboards, templates and methods proven in the heat of project delivery, with a high degree of transparency of project efforts at any point in time for project participants.

Total Learn-workspace redesign: Prior to substantially revamping their corporate environment, Total Learn engaged Laughing Mind to identify design patterns important to their staff in their workspace redesign, and present these into a design brief for interior design firms to assist in designer selection. Through the process of a workspace and processes review, online surveys and staff interviews, we drew the results together into a short concise brief, then assisted in the review of design firm responses to the brief, resulting in selection of an interior design firm that was most attuned to the needs of Total Learn and their valued staff.

  

"The space you work in can reinforce or wreck the culture of your organisation, as well as your brand positioning."
Source: AFR Boss in November 2005.

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