Teams of Teams!
The New Organizational Reality
for Program & Project Management

By David Pells

It may be time for some organizations to rethink organizational concepts, relationships and structures for managing major programs and projects.  In recent weeks, I have become familiar with a global program involving teams of administrative, diplomatic, financial, legal, program, project and technical participants, for projects being planned and deployed on a global basis.  At the same time, I have studied some recent thinking in the US Department of Defense (DoD) related to “system-of-systems” and “Network-based” counter-terrorism approaches.  It has now occurred to me that these DoD concepts are applicable in the program and project management world.  Once again, the PM world can use some ideas originating among military thought leaders.

The Growing Importance of Networks – and Network Thinking

Most of us now have global networks of professional colleagues, co-workers and friends.  We belong to professional organizations, or sub-networks of those associations.  We network on the basis of personal or professional interests, technical matters or projects.  The scope, reach and importance of such networks have been growing significantly in recent years, based on the worldwide web and the globalization of economies and communications technologies.  Each person in any such network also belongs to other networks, such as on a program or project, that might include another team or teams working on different activities, tasks, or sub-projects.

Military thinkers now recognize that fighting networks of mobile terrorist cells with large traditional military units does not work; the obvious answer is to create a network-based counter-terrorism organizational capability to increase flexibility and responsiveness.  Such a change, however, requires changes in the supporting organizational processes and infrastructure.  For example, if a resource is needed immediately for a task, or in response to a new development, that resource should be available and accessible quickly.  New information gathered in one network, or team, may need to be shared immediately with other teams who can utilize the same information.  In addition, small projects (at the bottom of a WBS, for example) may each require a different mix of resources from different sources. Even for programs and projects that can be planned well in advance, more flexible organizational approaches or options may be needed

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