Project Teams: Team Model vs. Hierarchical Model

Today’s enterprise applications are too complex for any one person to grasp completely. No one can hold all the requirements, options, and design choices in mind at one time. Several people, and several minds, need to work together to hold them all. In today’s enterprise environments, responsibility for application development must be assigned to a team rather than a single person.

For project teams to be successful, they should have:

Experienced leaders.

Self-motivated team members, empowered to make decisions and accountable for the success of their team’s role.

A focus on shipping the product.

A commitment to a shared project vision.

To facilitate communication, a project team should be a small, multi-disciplined group that has the following characteristics of good teambuilding:

Trust People can rely on each other, and each person exhibits repeatable patterns of consistent behavior. “We do what we say we will do.”

Respect People have regard for each other’s abilities. “We all add value to the team.”

Commitment Everyone agrees on the project’s goals and accepts success as an all-or-nothing proposition. “We will get it done, period.”

Accountability People act on clearly defined goals, responsibilities, and expectations. “I’ll do this, you’ll do that, and by Tuesday we’ll have built our house.”

These fundamental characteristics will lead the team to what’s known as the “right” principle: “It’s everyone’s responsibility to ship the right product at the right time.”

People sometimes have difficulty adjusting to working in teams. They are expecting to know “Who’s in charge?” A hierarchical model, such as an organization chart, describes who is in charge and who reports to whom. However, in today’s enterprise environments, assigning a single project manager to oversee all aspects of a development project and make all critical decisions creates many points where the project could fail. The challenges of a single manager approach can include:

An information bottleneck.

Insufficient perspective to address all the project’s needs.

Increases in miscommunication as information is filtered up the management hierarchy.

Difficulty in grasping the vast technical knowledge required of multiple-application platforms.

The overwhelming breadth of knowledge required integrating the project with current internal systems.

Difficulty in prioritizing business requirements against technical requirements.

A single experience, which limits the ability to quickly solve problems based on historical, more broad-based experience.

In addition, communication is more difficult in organizations that adhere to strict hierarchies, which by definition imply indirect communications. A hierarchical group’s communications may be “filtered” by three or four managers, thus significantly increasing the likelihood that the true message and intent will be lost. Often the greatest miscommunication occurs between upper management’s vision and the actual practical work on a project. This miscommunication can lead to the disengagement of individuals from the project, decreased productivity, and increased likelihood of project failure.

To combat many of the difficulties with a single manager approach, a team model describes the key roles and responsibilities of a project team. No single person is in charge of the overall project. Instead, each team member is in charge of a specific role that must be performed in order for the project to be successful.

The team model does not define the management structure of the team from a personnel-administration perspective. A multi-disciplined team acquires project resources from many departments within the organization and from the organization’s vendors. Project teams are specifically designed to address project goals and assign project responsibilities to different roles. The leaders of each role are responsible for executing their role’s activities given the resources assigned to their part of the team. The daily management tasks they perform within the roles are specifically related to project activities, not to particular human-resource (HR) activities. The HR management of the organization’s employees continues to be handled by each individual’s current manager. Such activities can include compensation plans, benefits, vacations, and performance reviews. The team provides performance information about individuals to their managers but doesn’t oversee the individual’s adherence to employment policies.

The team approach has its challenges. Potential pitfalls that need to be understood and continually mitigated include:

Lack of a single point of contact for external communication.

An inconsistent vision applied to different aspects of the project.

Team members with different agendas for the project.

Inexperience that prevents an effective team implementation.

Reference: ANALYZING REQUIREMENTS and DEFINING SOLUTION ARCHITECTURES, MICROSOFT CORPORATION. BY

SCOTT WILSON, BRUCE MAPLES, and TIM LANDGRAVE