Managers, please, when you consider doing a reorganization, keep this in mind:

We trained hard – but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing. And what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing inefficiency, confusion and demoralization. –Gaius Petronius, Arbiter, 1st Century AD

It’s as fitting now as it was two thousand years ago, which itself is an interesting observation on organizational behavior, but it has a more practical (and personal) impact: my unit was reorganized recently. Luckily, we seem to have survived the shift, mostly because our new boss is quite reasonable and wants us to succeed in our current projects, as well as bring us up to speed on the longer term goals of the new unit.

However, we’re only recently back up to full speed at work – we lost months of man-hours to the re-org. Being short staffed to begin with, this has set a lot of projects behind that we are scrambling to catch up on. I hope we can keep going the way we are, and not get re-org’ed again this Fall.