[VLM]

"the cost of restructuring an office to accommodate more people in different layouts"

From actual experience having been there, we saved money by simply not doing that. We did move cubes and offices on a fairly regular basis such that someone "tortured" by the air conditioner wouldn't suffer for long and likewise I only had a nice office for about a year.

WRT colocated teams, a long time ago I sat kitty corner to a guy who programmed FPGA based ISDN channel PBX cards for a living, and I should care why, exactly, as long as we were good neighbors to each other, which we were? I sat next to the guy who was in charge of OSPF internal routing despite my being a BGP guy and my BGP partner in crime sat fifty feet away, and it didn't really matter much because some of my BGP peers sat two thousand miles away? When I got a call in the middle of the night to fix something, I fixed it, not drive to one of my teammates houses so I can sit next to them before starting work.

Architecture decisions can help. All cubes must have a visitor chair preferably 2 or 3, although people "illegally" stacked manuals or threw coats on their chairs if they wanted to keep people out. A bit of work is necessary to stop people from sneaking up on you by orienting desks facing the cube entrance.

One of the most shocking things I've seen in open plan offices is the visual clutter. Its like working in the dirtiest most distracting looking house I've ever seen. I have junk laying around on my desk, but most open plans look like a tornado struck a Walmart. What a heap.