Charting Team Models
Introduction
This review explores the background and use of different team models in business and their applications.
Organizational Restructuring
Business executives are always looking for better ways to improve how their companies are managed in an effort to achieve business objectives.
One way is company organizational restructuring, aka company reorganizations or “reorg”.
In a typical reorganization, business units are eliminated or created, the company’s organization chart is redrawn, direct reports are shifted to another manager, company resources are redistributed, and business priorities are reassessed.
Similar to a company’s organizational restructuring, it is also possible to restructure the grouping of people for a specific objective or activity (team), alter the manner the team is managed, and redefine how team members work and interact.
Grouping people into teams bring diverse skills and viewpoints together and can help members with ongoing immediate social support.
However, grouping people into teams can produce power struggles, personality clashes, hierarchical issues, groupthink, and loss of accountability.
Team Management
The primary goal of team management is to promote team performance, efficiency, and motivation.
The secondary goal of any applied employee management approach is employee retention and raised morale.
Team management seeks higher collective productivity and team member motivation through increased team cohesion, communication, and collaboration.
A Team Model is a description that clearly frames a team’s structure, composition, role makeup, or management style.
The traditional approach to team management is the Managed Team model, where decision-making is centralized with a single manager.
However, experiments during the 1970s, notably at General Foods Corporation in the USA and at Volvo’s automobile production line in Sweden, have shown that job enrichment and decentralized decision-making can positively affect productivity, quality control, and employee satisfaction.
The decentralized decision-making approach to team management was initially characterized as collaborative management, delegated authority, and external leadership. Later it was called Empowerment.
Empowerment is a psychological concept that gives people more control, autonomy, self-determination, and accountability over themselves and their lives.
During the early 1990s and in the business context, the term Empowerment came to signify a decentralized decision-making approach to team management.
There are several highly-regarded books on team empowerment from the 1990s.
The result was the emergence of the Team Empowerment and Employee Empowerment management philosophy.
The empowerment management philosophy centers on proper job design (job enrichment and job enlargement) and different levels of decision-making authority and autonomy afforded to the employees.
Many popular modern team models subscribe to the team empowerment philosophy.
Team Models
The Work Team is the most basic team model where all team members belong to the same organizational function.
Most companies are organized by work teams, e.g., marketing communications team, human resources team, accounting team, product development team, executive management team, etc.
A Functional Team, aka Directed Team or Traditional Team or Intact Team, is a work team with all team members from one organizational function.
Traditionally, a functional team was managed by one manager who owns all decision-making.
The Cross-Functional Team,aka Matrix Team or Inter-working Team or Multi-functional Team, comprises team members from different organizational functions.
The Self-Managed Team is a team model which describes a functional or cross-functional team without an official manager or designated leader.
Self-managed teams share leadership and work responsibilities among their members.
The self-managed team has an autonomy level and a decision-making scope that is determined by someone outside the team.
The Self-Organized Team is a self-managed team where the team’s boundaries, mission, and objectives, are determined by someone outside the team.
The self-organized team has the leeway to operate as it deems fit within these boundaries.
The Self-Directed Team, aka Self-Governing Team, is a self-managed team where the team’s boundaries, mission, and objectives, can be determined by the team itself.
The self-directed team is more autonomous than a self-organized team, with more accountability and commitment.
A Special Purpose Team, aka Contract Team, is a team model where the team is tasked with dealing with a particular problem through a short-term project. The special-purpose team is disbanded after the specific problem is addressed.
A Problem Solving Team, aka Troubleshooting Team,is a team model where the specially formed team handles acute problems requiring immediacy, a crisis, or an emergency.
A Management Team is a particular team model where the team’s output is strategic decisions and policies that impact the company. The company’s executive management officers and the board of directors exemplify a management team.
An Empowered Team is a team model that subscribes to the team empowerment philosophy.
Notably, the self-managed, self-organized, and self-directed teams are popular types of empowered teams.
All team models are generic and can be applied to any organizational function.
Application of Team Models in Product Development
Component team, cross-component team, delivery team, engineering team, agile team, scrum team, sprint team, etc., are different types of product development teams.
Product development teams differ by role composition, structure, and purpose.
Any generic team model can be applied to a product development team to alter how it is managed and the manner of decision making.
Scrum, a popular software development method, explicitly advocates several generic team models.
The Scrum Guide, the official handbook to implementing Scrum, refers to self-managing teams, cross-functional teams, and team empowerment.
The Scrum Guide advocates applying these team models to the “Scrum Team”, a collective term that describes a product development team comprising developers and two additional Scrum-specific roles (Scrum Product Owner and Scrum Master).
Application of Team Models in Product Management
Any generic team model can be applied to a product management team.
The functional, cross-functional, managed, self-organized, self-directed, special-purpose, problem-solving, etc., generic team models can be applied individually or jointly to a product management team.
There are several popular and trending team ideas that deserve mention.
These team concepts, for which various interpretations exist, are being associated with product management and perhaps product development.
Product Team apparently refers to most anybody working on or associated with the product.
There is virtually no information on the so-called product team’s structure, composition, role makeup, and management style.
Feature Team or Feature Factory is a product team that focuses primarily on producing features.
Empowered Product Team, AKA by some as The Product Team or Product Squad, is a product team tasked with solving a customer’s problem.
It is difficult to make definitive judgments on these specific teams because of their vagueness and dependence on the incomplete idea of a Product Team.
However, the behavioral characterization offered of these team ideas suggests they reflect different product delivery strategies.
If so, then the feature team describes a characteristic of a technology-driven company dominated by engineers who attempt to manipulate the value formula and increase the value of a product by adding features.
And an empowered product team describes a characteristic of a market-driven company, where product managers that focus on the market problem and the problem space, are dominant.
Product Teams and Groups in PMTK
The Blackblot PMTK Methodology™ provides a detailed description of organizing product groups, departments, and teams.
Relative to product management, the top container in a company’s organizational structure is the Product Group, regarded as a business unit.
The product group holds different Departments — in PMTK, it comprises the Product Planning and the Product Marketing departments.
Members of the product group’s departments form teams for different purposes, e.g., Product Management Team and Product Definition Team.
PMTK specifies three team models: Product Management, Product Definition, and Product Development.
The Engineering Group, the Product Group’s counterpart, comprises the Development, Quality Assurance, and User Experience departments.
Members of the Engineering Group’s departments usually form different types of Product Development Teams.
Team members can span different groups and departments.
For example, a Product Definition Team member can belong to departments in the Product or Engineering groups.
Joining the product management with engineering departments under one product group and reporting to one executive runs contrary to PMTK foundation rules and can foster conflicting interests.
All three PMTK team models are detailed in the first (2010) and second (2017) editions of the Blackblot PMTK Book.
It is noted that the Blackblot PMTK® Methodology considers Engineering to be different from Product Development. A Customer is different from a User, and both are different from a Market (many customers and users). These terms and entities all have a special place and meaning in PMTK, and they are not interchangeable.
Summary
All team models are generic and can be applied to any organizational function.
Applying a team model to a group of people will yield certain behaviors and outcomes.
Accordingly, a particular team model must be applied for the given circumstances to promote efficiency and motivation and minimize the potentially inherent problems of grouping people.
This review charts common team models, their background, and their application.