Building Better IT SWAT Teams (continued)
Balance individual accountability with a clear chain of command. The best teams don't necessarily duplicate skills, says Dean Meyer, chairman of NDMA Inc., a management-consulting firm based in Ridgefield, Conn. "Each member of the team needs to understand the specific contribution and/or deliverable that he or she is responsible for, and not meddle in other people's domains," he says.
Find - and involve - people from other disciplines. It's rare that a technical problem impacts only IT. "Once you make changes to an application, to the infrastructure or to the network, there are implications for anyone who uses those resources," says Jeff Gibson, vice president of consulting for The Table Group, a managing consulting firm based in Lafayette, Calif. "You need to have all the stakeholders represented on that team." In particular, members of the affected user community must have someone participating in order to come up with a solution they will be satisfied with.
Clarify the loyalties of team members. Because the team is temporary, by implication all members of it have other "real" jobs to do. To avoid cases of divided loyalties, members must know their responsibilities on the team and how that time commitment relates to their regular job. "Managers must be exceedingly clear about the priorities," stipulates Gibson. "If someone is expected to give 100 percent to the team, that has to be approved by his or her manager - and everyone must be very clear about how it will work on a practical basis from day to day." (article continues)
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