A Manager's Guide to Achieving Commitment to Quality and InnovationWhat is a Team?
Not All Teams Are Alike
What is your mental picture when you say “team?” Do you see a small group of people working closely together or do you see a large number of people scattered around the world, all working on one project? There is quite a difference between these two pictures, but they both describe project teams.
If you want your project to succeed, you must pay attention to things like team size. In the book The Deadline, Tom DeMarco said what happens when a team is the wrong size. “The teams were too big. During the whole time that design should have been going on, they had too many people to involve in that activity. Design is a job for a small group. You can put three or four or maybe five people around a white board and they can do design together. But you can’t put twenty people around a white board.”
We are going to review three models for team structure and look at how to effectively manage each type of team. Next, we will look at a entirely different types of teams, teams that are not physically together, virtual teams and the networked teams.
Often you find sub-groups within a project team and these smaller groups take on a structure that is different from the overall team structure. To be effective, teams must dynamically change to meet the needs of the situation. A rigid structure gets in the way. The purpose of this article is to show you have options and trade-offs. One size does not fit all….
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Copyright © 2003, Bill Kuehn and Steve Wille
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