Our office covers about 900 square feet in two connected rooms. We’ve used the smaller room as a meeting area and the larger room as our ‘production’ area.
At four people this was an ideal layout, but as we grew to five, six, and now eight people, it got too tight. The proximity of our desks caused interruptions and productivity and personal satisfaction suffered. So we decided to rebuild our office.
We used a process for this that’s very similar to the problem solving we do to help clients rebuild their sites, create a strong brand, or fix a marketing problem.
Step 1: Define the problem + state your goals
We started by identifying the problems we wanted to solve: too many people pushed together in too little space. Our goals were to provide more personal space, promote collaboration, diminish interruptions, and provide room for growth without another major office overhaul.
Step 2: Do research + assess the situation
Insufficient planning can derail a project, so we started by collecting the details of our situation: the office dimensions, space needed for desks, tables, chairs, bookshelves, and the kitchen area. We then took stock of our technical needs and human needs, like who needed to collaborate most often, who needed open wall space for working files, etc. On top of all this we looked at the pathways people use to get through the office and the proximity key staff need to work together on tasks.
Step 3: Develop + refine the plan
Our assessment led us to a draft of a new layout. To test it, we considered different scenarios, such as client visits, staff growth, or new equipment. We made sure to allow access to the printers for those who use them most. We considered lighting and how windows reflect on our screens during the day, and where the power outlets and network drops are.
With this in mind, we refined our sketches to put the final, better plan in place.
Step 4: Plan the implementation
It’s important to not just construct a plan, but also to determine how it will be implemented. Order of operations (and delegating responsibilities) is especially important. We determined who would move the desks, run the network cables, clean up, set up the computers after the desks were in place, and store everything during our “temporary” state. We split the time for this over two days - the first phase (break down the existing office) would take place on Thursday afternoon, the second phase, clean and rebuild, for Friday from 3pm until it was done.
Step 5: Do it
After our planning was done, we executed our plans. It was easy and there were few problems to deal with because we had already thought through our tasks and goals.
Step 6: Reward success
To help make the transition more enjoyable we picked up two office presents to improve our environment. The first is an Air-O-Swiss humidifier
. We find the cold, dry winters are a drag on our breathing and skin. With the Air-O-Swiss we’ll all breathe a little easier.
Our second gift was a Keurig B70 Gourmet Brewing System. This is a great little device that makes single cups of coffee, tea, and hot chocolate. Perfect for us or clients, no clean up, and no extra coffee to throw away at the end of the day. And these presents to ourselves help make the work worth it — there’s a reward at the end.
Step 7: Evaluate + refine
Over the next couple of weeks we’ll see how things work and make adjustments. Maybe one desk will be too near a door, a trash can will be too far away from the Keurig, or the paper will be too far from the printers. We’ll tweak the new layout until it solves the problems that prompted the change.
These steps are important for any problem-solving project, be it an office reorganization or building a website. Define your goals and objectives, assess the situation, develop and refine your plan, execute, celebrate your success, and keep at it in the long term to make sure your plan works to solve the initial problems as well as possible.
It seems that with each day computers are exceedingly more powerful but we do less and less with them. The guidance computer used to land Apollo on the moon ran at 2.048 MHz and had 2K of memory. The slowest computer in our office runs at 2.0 GHz and has 1.0 GB of memory and we’re not doing anything nearly as impressive as putting a man on the moon. Next year’s computers will make that look seriously outdated.
UMass Memorial Hospital in Worcester needed a new way for its physicians to communicate with each other, as well as a new way to distribute documents to physicians. They suspected that the web would allow them to achieve this goal, but weren’t sure quite how to do it.
Nancy Hunter Denney is a nationally known and recognized author, speaker, and consultant who serves educational institutions, non-profits, and corporate clients to help the develop leadership and take charge of life. We built her 
