Incorporating part-time team members

Another Esther Derby article - Incorporating part-time team members, discusses the pressures of being on multiple teams and how hard it is to truly become part of any of them without help from the team itself.

When someone works on a team part time, he is by definition missing part of the context of the team. While the part-timer is off doing something else, the full-time team makes decisions, solves problems, and exchanges information. While the full-time team may document and transmit major events, there are numerous small decisions and communication events that may not seem important enough to pass along but still affect the way the work is done. The adage "You never step in the same river twice" fits this situation. Each time the part-timer re-enters the team, the team has inevitably moved on from the last time the part-timer participatedaaa.

For the first time, I think I've recently felt empathy for people in this situation, and from there realised just how often this has been a problem in my work experience, and how I hadn't realised that this had been a problem with a particular period of time a few years back for me.  The past two months or so have been full of these sorts of realisations for me - and hopefully I can use the opportunity well.