Mixing the teams up

Here at Wiliam we're in the process of making some changes to the way we work as a team. For the 4.5 years I've worked at Wiliam we've sat in functional teams which is fairly standard practise. I'm a developer so logically I was sitting with the rest of the development team, this makes perfect sense, but in reality the majority of my communication is with the producer or my project not the rest of the development team.

So the idea was to trial sitting in project teams which means desk changes will be happening alot more frequently. Of course this won't always go to plan since some people are across multiple projects at once so they may end up sitting outside their primary project team. I happened to fall into this case where I'm sitting outside of my project team, but instead of being surrounded by other developers as before I'm now sitting with members of Design, IA/UX and Production.

We've been in this configuration for almost a month so I guess now I can reflect on how it's worked out. Sure I'm not benefiting from being in a project team at the moment, however I've found it quite refreshing and interesting to be sitting amongst people from other departments. Development is the final step in the production process so we usually only see the final product of sales, IA and design. It gives me insight into how they work and what their processes are, I'm genuinely finding it interesting to overhear their conversations and see how they work. I've been able to offer some technical advice to my new neighbours aswell.

At first I was a little skeptical of the idea, but I'm definitly sold on it now, I'm looking forward to moving desks a few times a year.