… de personas y sistemas.
Archive for May, 2009
Increasing Performance Using Multiple Monitors
32 years ago
A few months ago I was reading an article, initially published by Jason Calacanis and later translated into Spanish by Alec Oxenford, about money savings by implementing quick and simple tips as part of a start-up. One of the most discussed points was the usage of multiple monitors to increase the developers performance.
Today, I found Stefan Didak home office photo on Flikr .
This finally raised my curiosity on how a developer performance can be boost by using more than one monitor.
After a quick research looking for statistical data and performance increase facts, i found no more than a few personal experiences posted by people that tested multiple monitors and papers published by monitor and video card manufacturers.
ANew York Times Artivle states that the productivity increases between 20% and 30%. The experience comes from writers who can work on their articles while seeing the outline or draft on the second monitor; designers who can edit images in one monitor and having a previous version (or the original) in the second monitor for their reference. Some few are from Web-shoppers who can do their orders in an easier way.
Obviously all this activities can also be done using a single monitor; the clue here is the increase in the velocity used to do each activity. The time taken in looking for the window in the task bar and activating it (and back) is significantly higher than the one taken to look at the other monitor instead. Yes, the experts use Alt-Tab; but the issue here appears when trying to reach back to the original window, there are two alternatives 1) get back using Alt-Shift-Tab or 2) keep pressing Alt-Tab several times until reaching up the original window. This is really a time waste.
Additionally, I found an article published in Computerworld; it also talks about using multiple monitors, but it states that in several cases, employees preffer a single monitor in order to have more free space in their desks.
In my personal experience, i work with a 14″ wide-screen notebook. During some time I had the opportunity to have a second monitor in the office, a 17″ one, and the comfort it gave me was really higher. It let me work on the project documents and spreadsheets while reading e-mails in the second monitor and using MS project, which is not designed for a 14″ monitor at all.
A second monitor can definitely increase the comfort and velocity; and in consequence the productivity. The only remaining fact to research about is if the cost increment associated with the acquisition and maintenance of the double monitors makes sense… But I’ll leave it to your own criteria. 
Fying Post-Its
02 years ago
by Martin Alaimo
in Experiences
A few days ago, in the Agile Latin America Community (http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/foro-agiles/message/1738), the Flying Post-Its topic was discussed: they fall down, they fly, etc. from ScrumBoards or TaskBoards.
The recommendations were several of different kinds, i.e:
- the usage of “super sticky” Post-Its,
- Scotch Magic tape,
- UHU Tac bar
- Magnetic boards.
In my last 2 experiences applying Scrum on delivery teams we tried using cork boards, regular post-its and Push Pins supporting them. The first implementation of this kind raised by chance; we were waiting for the arrival of the regular board and in the meantime, using easel-pads (Fig.1). Due to the delay in the delivery of the regular board, we made use of a cork board that wasn’t being used at all, we started attaching the post-its to it, but they immediately start falling down. We rapidly used Push pins to attach them to the cork board, preventing them to fall down (Fig.2).
By doing this we found out 2 benefits, apart from avoiding flying post-its: 1) being able to attach a big amount of post-its with a single push pin (Fig.3), using less space (ie. in the “pending” section), and 2) using different colors of push pins for each team member (Fig.4), making it easy to identify the person working on each post-it.
References:
- Fig.1: Easel Pad board @ Accenture – SCM Team
Fig.2: Cork Board @ Gorricho
Fig.3: User Story + Tasks in "Delivered" section @ Gorricho
Fig.4: Each member one Color
