Following the agile teams we adopted in October we are putting in the first bigger change to make us more effective: we are embracing the fact that projects get done more naturally across teams and thus now have three organisational elements:
- teams as homebases for members to ease onboarding and connectedness
- guilds as knowledge hubs for certain topic
- projects as places where most of the work happens
The structure of teams and guilds has not changed, but the way we want to work on projects has been adjusted. Instead of having the fixed teams work on projects, the group of people that will be working on a project is to be formed again for each project.
This reflects the reality of what we have been doing anyway, and makes it even easier for people not (yet) being part of a team to participate in projects. During the life of a project it is even possible to join and leave the project, since that may make sense. One example is the need for a copywriter towards the end of a project, to brush up documentation – it would be a waste of resources to block him for the entire duration of the project. Or why block a developer during the early phases of a redesign project, when she can do other things?
Now that projects are more open than ever for participation, we also want to make them more visible, which is why there is now a page listing current, proposed and finished projects.