[?] Building a flexible team page : looking for ideas !

Hello,

I am currently building a wp site for a NPO. They want to have a “team” page. The team is separated in a few departments. THe structure looks somewhat like this :

Dept 1
– Employee rank 1
– Employee rank 2
– Employee rank 2 (sorted alphabetically)
Dept 2
– …

Each employee “is” a post.
I want to make the system so it is quite easy to :

• Add an employee to any dept (that is already easy, of course).
• Change the dept the employee is attached to.
• Change the order of the departements (w/o loosing the employee attached!)

So here is what I’ve thought so far :

• Each dept as a category
• Employee rank and name in a custom field : rank.name so I can sort them by rank then alphabetically by name.

then I display the team on a page using the following piece of code :

global $ancestor;
$childcats = get_categories('child_of=' . $cat . '&hide_empty=1');
foreach ($childcats as $childcat) {
	echo '<h2>'.category_description($childcat->cat_ID).'</h2>';
  if (cat_is_ancestor_of($ancestor, $childcat->cat_ID) == false){
query_posts(array ( 'order' => 'asc', 'category__in' => array($childcat->cat_ID),'orderby' => 'meta_value', 'meta_key' => 'classement_equipe' ));
	if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();
	echo '<div class="featured-thumbnail">'; the_post_thumbnail(); echo '</div>';
	the_content(__('[+]'));
	endwhile; else:
	echo 'error';
	endif;
  }
}

The problem is I cant change the category order!!

Do you have any ideas : should I use custom post types ? Taxonomies ? more custom fields ?

Thanks a lot !