Teams enable us to do things we could never accomplish working individually — or if we could accomplish them, they would just take too long to be worth doing. For that reason alone, we need teams. But working in teams carries with it risks that arise much more often than when we work as individuals. Here's a short catalog of these risks.
- Runaway damage risk
- The power of teamwork amplifies not only the team's ability to do good, but also its ability to do damage. When we produce wrong-headed output for whatever reason, we must undo the damage we do. But before recognizing what happened, a team can do much more damage than an individual can.
- Interpersonal conflict risk
- When there are interpersonal problems in teams, everyone's productivity can be degraded. And the conflict might be unrelated to the work at hand. It can be a residual effect of a previous effort, or it can arise from something as unrelated to the work as unfounded rumors of changes in office assignments.
- Decision-making risk
- The word team means different things to different people. For example, with respect to decision processes, some of us believe that team means that each person's opinion is of equal weight. Others are searching only for work to do, and will do that work without question. Teams must define their decision processes for corresponding classes of situations. If they don't, each member will assume that their preferred decision process is in force. That difference in expectations can lead to interpersonal conflict. See "Decisions, Decisions: I," Point Lookout for November 17, 2004, for a summary of common decision processes.
- Coordination risk
- Teamwork is inherently parallel. The working members of the team assume that the parts they're working on will fit with the parts other people are working on. If a problem develops, and one of the parts has to be revised, some of the work already completed might have to be done again. This possibility is much less likely when a single person does all the work, because that person is presumably aware of all that has been done or will be done. Coordination risk is highest when interpersonal communication is the least effective, or when uncertainty is greatest.
- Wariness risk
- Inherent in The power of teamwork amplifies
not only the team's ability to do
good, but also its ability to do damageparallelism is the need to trust that teammates working on other elements are honoring their commitments. That is, we give our all to one portion of the work, trusting teammates to do the same with theirs. If trust is absent, and people become wary, they devote some of their efforts to protecting themselves from blame. That is what makes wariness so expensive. - Intra-task deadlock risk
- Within the team's task, deadlock occurs when some members of the team are waiting for the output of one or more of the rest of the team. The whole thing can lock up if a dependency loop develops. If a subtask is late because of unanticipated difficulty or lost workdays, the rest of the team can become stuck.
Team-based development is different from the scaled-up effort of a single individual. Think it through carefully. Top Next Issue
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Related articles
More articles on Project Management:
- Resuming Projects: Team Morale
- Sometimes we cancel a project because of budgetary constraints. We reallocate its resources and scatter
its people, and we tell ourselves that the project is on hold. But resuming is often riskier, more difficult
and more expensive than we hoped. Here are some reasons why.
- Nine Project Management Fallacies: I
- Most of what we know about managing projects is useful and effective, but some of what we "know"
just isn't so. Identifying the fallacies of project management reduces risk and enhances your ability
to complete projects successfully.
- The Politics of Lessons Learned
- Many organizations gather lessons learned — or at least, they believe they do. Mastering the political
subtleties of lessons learned efforts enhances results.
- Durable Agreements
- People at work often make agreements in which they commit to cooperate — to share resources, to
assist each other, or not to harm each other. Some agreements work. Some don't. What makes agreements durable?
- Seven Planning Pitfalls: III
- We usually attribute departures from plan to poor execution, or to "poor planning." But one
cause of plan ineffectiveness is the way we think when we set about devising plans. Three cognitive
biases that can play roles are the so-called Magical Number 7, the Ambiguity Effect, and the Planning Fallacy.
See also Project Management and Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
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- And on May 22: Rescheduling Collaborative Work
- Rescheduling is what we do when the schedule we have now is so desperately unachievable that we must let go of it because when we look at it we can no longer decide whether to laugh or cry. The fear is that the new schedule might come to the same end. Available here and by RSS on May 22.
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