[jodacola]

How timely! Just this week, I was able to bring together our client's large IT team with my agency's large team of engineers in a shared Slack, after nearly a year and a half of our only communications being through email and (lots of) ad hoc Skype calls.

My vision driving what has been a many-month push to get our teams together is to build a much higher degree of trust, respect, and collaboration between the teams of engineers, to enable our program team (consisting of both the client's team and our agency's team) to more nimbly plan and triage issues together, and to mitigate email grenades that unnecessarily pull in business stakeholders who, without context, see only bits and pieces and (understandably) fear the worst.

The combining of the teams is obviously still early in the experiment and there's a lot of history we are going to need to overcome together, but I'm optimistic this will be one of the simplest but most effective strategic moves I'll have made in my career up to this point. I'm excited about the future (challenges and all) for the team and will be doing everything in my power to make sure everyone is supported and building the trust necessary in any high-performance team.