How do you organize your teams?

[SpeedDaemon]

I always seem to reach a point where it gets harder and more time consuming to efficiently allocate talent. This is mostly because it's somewhere between hard and impossible to maintain team compatibility rating when you start moving employees between teams after they're hired (since hiring is the only time it will actually tell you how compatible someone is with the existing team).

So my question is, how do you organize your teams once you start dealing with multiple products and projects (ie. developing two products, supporting 2-3, research, etc.)

I've been trying to maintain balanced teams (covers all specializations), but this means that your 3D and audio devs/designers might be twiddling their thumbs when creating a 2D editor, etc.

Is it better to have many smaller teams that are more specialized? (a system dev team with a lead and 5-6 devs, an audio team with a lead and 2 devs, etc.) It would allow more easily re-allocating specific skills, but seems like it would quickly end up as a micromanagement nightmare.

[LatN's Strategy]

When you move one person at a time, when you hover over the new team, the compatibility is show to you, always move if 125% or better.

Tips for best efficiency in my S02 videos...

[robertklein78]

In my opinion it is better to have smaller teams, I mostly work with just a few design teams, usually up to eight people depending on the software you want to make. Design usually goes pretty fast if they are good at their Jobs. If they go too fast, they can do some design contracts in between to keep them from hanging round the watercooler. Development takes a lot more time, so I use several more teams of those, mostly specialized in the software I am wanting to create. And those teams are flexibele, working in larger offices then needed so I can adjust them in size or specialization if I need to. You can try one designteam with up to three development teams, as I noticed. With this setup, you eliminate people idling for a long time. It also helps with giving them the right educations. I normally do not use special art teams, as they fly though their work so I use artists in every development team that can also do some programming as a secundary job.
To really speed things up, a special and not too expensive beta-team can check for bugs after development. That way, the dev team can start making a new product already.

[rotemata]

I'd rather not think about it and use the HR management with 3 stars leader in HR. it automatically hires employees with the best compability and balances the specializations.

[Leo Fern]

I keep my teams small and specialized, 2 - 8 staff per team.
Staff vacation: June - September (4 months spread)

How I generally prefer my setup:

Design-System-01, [-02, -03, -04]
Design-2D-01
Design-Audio-01

Art-2D-01
Art-3D-01
Art-Audio-01

Code-System-01
Code-2D-01
Code-Audio-01

Support: 8 staff. 4 = support. 4 = medium programmers (3 stars primary + 2 stars).
Bugfixing teams: 8 staff, all medium programmers (3 stars primary + 2 stars)
Porting teams: same setup as bugfixing teams

I try to keep bugfixing teams to fix bugs for 3 - 7 products at the same time

I have separate marketing teams for making video-content press releases; it helps me to move them around as needed. When they are finished with all press releases, I add them as additional marketing teams for my latest products.

Market-01
MarketVideo-01

Support-01
Bug-01
Porting-01
Law-01

If I need bugfixing in beta stage, the porting crews can handle the first 200-400 bugs until they are out of their competence zone. The legal teams, once done with patents, can perform either bugfixing or marketing.

Art and audio teams get to do additional marketing when they are finished with their tasks.

[KayDawg13]

I don't usually move people to different teams, the only time I do is when I'm creating a new team and hiring a leader. I try to match the compatibility with my core, transfer to the new team and go from there.
I used to do program teams of about 10-15, 3-4 teams working round the clock.
1-2 design teams of maybe 10 people.
2-3 support teams of like 10 people just working on post release bug fixing.
and 2 marketing teams with 10 people.
the teams sizes were mostly limited because of the size of my buildings and the rooms the teams were using.
my current game I am using 1 floor per team, with desk space for 20 people.
I have my Core that does both design and development. 5 designers that can do some programming and art as well, 5 artists that can do a some design and programming, and 9 programmers that can do a little of the other 2 as well. I let my founder hire and handle education, it seems to be working so far.
then I have 1 support team with 20 people doing the post release bug fixing. I might hire a new smaller team to do overnights working on bug fixing, not sure yet.
and I have marketing team of like 10 people.
it's still kind of early in my game, I think I'm in 1988, just released my 3rd PC OS and have like $75 million. it'll take me about 2 years to release the next OS, at least a year of that is design. I was thinking of doing just a design team to work on that and do research when not working on new programs.