The executive floor and the board room
Floor 11 is the executive suite: six offices and a spare room along a corridor, and a board room at the end of it. This is the seventh post in the series. In the lift, press the minus key to get here.
Six offices and a spare
The corridor has seven doors on four ranks. Each carries a name, and the table shows where they are.
| Side | Front of the corridor | Second | Third | Beside the lift |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| West | Chief Executive | Quality | Partnerships | Executive office |
| East | Product | Developer Experience | Assurance |
The Chief Executive has the room at the front of the corridor. The five rooms beside it used to answer as five more chief executives. Four now hold the four offices that nobody was running: what we are building, whether it works, what it costs to work here and who we owe an answer to. Those are Product, Quality, Developer Experience and Partnerships. The fifth is the spare room.
Assurance sits on this floor on purpose. It takes a claim the practice has made and checks it against the world. An auditor two doors from the people whose work it grades learns to grade gently, which is why internal audit reports to a board and not to the department it audits.
The spare room is at the back on the west side, beside the lift. It reads Executive office on its door and nobody answers there. A floor with nowhere to put the next thing is worse than one with a free room, so I kept it, and it needed a fourth rank of rooms to fit. Four ranks make the rooms shallower than the 15 foot rooms on the practice, for the same reason the suite’s are. The corridor has to stay the same length.
What is on the walls
Each office is dressed for its work, and most of them have a board.
The Chief Executive has a bigger desk than the others, and two visitor chairs facing it. A board on the back wall is headed THE PORTFOLIO and lists the products: flamenet, Hitt Hosting, SE, Caelum, Messenger and Leanwise.
Product has a wall headed IN SPEC, with what a thing is for and who for, what it must do and must not do, and how we know it is done. A second board faces the desk, headed CUT, AND WHY. Cutting something is a decision, so it is written down where it can be read.
Quality has a bench with a phone, a tablet and a small laptop on it, the things to test on. Its board is headed WHAT BROKE and says steps, expected, actual. The last line reads a report without steps is a rumour.
Developer Experience has a board headed THE LOOP. It reads idea to running, in minutes, then setup, build, test, deploy. A clock hangs on the side wall because the loop is the one thing this office measures, and there are two monitors on the desk.
Partnerships has shelves of binders and a board headed WHO IS WAITING. Its columns read agreed, outstanding and due. Two chairs stand on the visitor side of the desk, because this is the office people are brought to.
Assurance has a run of low cabinets for what was claimed, and two screens on the desk. One claim read twice is still one reading, so the second screen is for looking at it from a second place. The board reads CLAIMED, then OBSERVED.
The lamp, the flag and the person at the desk work as they do on the floors below. The lamp by each door is dark, amber or green. The screen reads the office’s name and, to anyone signed out, the word locked. During office hours, which are 10:00 to 14:00 Eastern on weekdays, five people sit at desks and three walk the corridor.
The board room
The room at the end of the corridor is the board room, and it is the room a board room wants: no through traffic. It is 30 feet wide and 22 deep.
The first version did not work. The lift shaft stands in the front third of that space, so anyone who walked to the end of the corridor met a pair of lift doors with dark space on either side. Four times over, people reported that there was no board room, only a door and empty space. The table was there all along, ten feet behind the shaft, with the lift hiding half of it.
Moving a sign would not have fixed it. The room had no front. So I divided the plate the way a building does. The strip with the lift in it is a lift lobby. Behind the shaft, a wall with two doorways in it shuts off the board room, one on each side of the lift, with BOARD ROOM in gold letters over each. One doorway in the middle would sit directly behind the shaft, which is the same mistake one storey along.
Inside, the carpet is a deeper colour than the corridor’s, so the room feels like somewhere else the moment you step in. The table is 20 feet long and about 6 feet wide, and it runs across the room. Laid down the length of the room, it put an end chair out past the doorway and into the lift approach, a random chair in front of the elevator. Across the 30 foot width it clears the shaft and still seats twelve, five on each long side and one at each end. The chairs are high-backed.
At the back is a credenza under an 11 foot screen. The screen is dark. Two pendant lamps hang over the table and the light in the room is low and warm.
The lift directory lists the room as Board room, after the offices.