Colocation

Resource technique · See it on the map

Runnable here

Putting most of a project team in one physical workspace to get faster, more informal communication.

When to use it

Use it when the work genuinely needs tight, fast-turnaround collaboration — early design, a crunch period, a crisis response — and the people involved and the budget can actually support putting them in one place, even temporarily (a shared "war room" for two weeks counts).

When to avoid it

Colocation is expensive — office space, relocation, or travel — and often simply not available: team members may be permanent remote hires, in different cities by necessity, or the budget doesn't stretch to a shared workspace. It is not the default-correct answer to a coordination problem; when it isn't available, the honest response is deliberate virtual-team practice (see above), not treating the coordination gap as unsolvable.

Steps

1. Identify which part of the work actually benefits from colocation — usually a specific phase, not the whole project — so you're not paying for shared space the team doesn't need for the full duration.
2. Confirm the people who matter most to that phase can actually be there; colocating three of five people and leaving the other two remote often just relocates the coordination problem rather than solving it.
3. Set up a shared, visible workspace — a team room, a physical board — that makes status and blockers visible without a meeting, which is the actual benefit colocation is buying.
4. Plan the end of the colocation period as deliberately as the start, so the team has a real transition plan back to distributed work instead of an abrupt drop in communication.

What it produces

• A team physically positioned to communicate quickly during the period that needed it
• A shared workspace that surfaces status and blockers without a scheduled meeting

Common pitfalls

• Colocating for the whole project when only one phase needed it, which spends the budget on space the later, more independent work didn't require.
• Assuming colocation alone fixes a team that has a real conflict or unclear roles — proximity makes good communication faster, it doesn't manufacture communication that wasn't going to happen anyway.
• Ending the colocation period abruptly with no transition, so the team's coordination quality falls off a cliff the day the shared space closes instead of stepping down gradually.

Worked example

A small architecture firm colocates its four-person team for the three-week schematic design phase of a client renovation in a borrowed conference room, because the phase depends on fast back-and-forth sketching that email and video calls slow down badly. Once schematic design is approved, the team returns to its normal, mostly remote working pattern for construction documentation, which doesn't need the same tempo.

Source

• PMBOK-6 §9.4.2.1

Where it comes from: this technique is named by the PMBOK Guide, 6th edition.