Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [41]
The summer of 2007 turned into fall. Real estate prices edged down in hot spots like Las Vegas and San Diego, signaling the end of a housing boom. Senators Obama and Clinton seemed to campaign endlessly in Iowa. The Red Sox marched toward their second World Series crown of the decade, and Blue J grew smarter.
But Ferrucci noted a disturbing trend among his own team: It was slowing down. When technical issues came up, they often required eight or ten busy people to solve them. If a critical algorithm person or a member of the hardware team was missing, the others had to wait a day or two, or three, by which point someone else was out of pocket. Ferrucci worried. Even though the holidays were still a few months away and they had all of 2008 to keep working, his boss, a manager named Arthur Ciccolo, never tired of telling him that the clock was ticking. It was, and Ferrucci—thinking very much like a computer engineer—viewed his own team as an inefficient system, one plagued with low bandwidth and high latency. As team members booked meeting rooms and left phone messages, vital information was marooned for days at a time, even weeks, in their own heads.
Computer architects faced with bandwidth and latency issues often place their machines in tight clusters. This reduces the distance that information has to travel and speeds up computation. Ferrucci decided to take the same approach with his team. He would cluster them. He found an empty lab at Hawthorne and invited his people to work there. He called it the War Room.
At first it looked more like a closet, an increasingly cluttered one. The single oval table in the room was missing legs. So the researchers piggybacked it on smaller tables. It had a tilt and a persistent wobble, no matter how many scraps of cardboard they jammed under the legs. There weren’t enough chairs, so they brought in a few from the nearby cafeteria. Attendance in the War Room was not mandatory but an initial crew, recognizing the same bandwidth problems, took to it right away. With time, others who stayed in their offices started to feel out of the loop. They fetched chairs and started working at the same oval table. The War Room was where decisions were being made.
For high-tech professionals, it all seemed terribly old-fashioned. People were standing up, physically, when they had a problem and walking over to colleagues or, if they were close enough, rolling over on their chairs. Nonetheless, the pace of their work quickened. It was not only the good ideas that were traveling faster; bad ones were, too. This was a hidden benefit of higher bandwidth. With more information flowing, people could steer colleagues away from the dead ends and time drains they’d already encountered. Latency fell. “Before, it was like we were running in quicksand,” said David Gondek, a new Ph.D. from Brown who headed up machine learning. Like many of the others on the team, Gondek started using his old office as a place to keep stuff. It became, in effect, his closet.
It was a few weeks after Ferrucci set up the War Room that the company safety inspector dropped by. He saw monitors propped on books and ethernet cables snaking along the floor. “The table was wobbly. It was a nightmare,” Ferrucci said. The inspector told them to clear out. Ferrucci started looking for a bigger room and quickly realized his team members expected cubicles in the larger space. He told them no, he didn’t want them to have the “illusion of returning to a private office.” He found a much larger room on the third floor. Someone had left a surfboard there. Ferrucci’s team propped it at the entrance and sat a tiny toy bird, a bluebird, on top of it. It was the closest specimen they could find to a blue jay.
A war room, of course, was hardly unique to Ferrucci’s team. Financial trading floors and newsrooms at big newspapers had been using war rooms for decades. All of these operations involved piecing together networks of information. Each person, ideally, fed the others. But