Project Recovery through Self Directed Work Teams

In the 1980’s I had the great fortune to work in Montreal Canada with a group of mostly young people who were new to the world of teamwork.  Most were recent college grads that, on a few occasions had worked with one or two other students on a small class assignment.

They graduated, got a job and found themselves in a new, not so friendly environment.  They could not do the job they were assigned without the help of others, but most of the others were new too.  Well they had bosses, right?  Everyone has a boss, even at home.  So they had had bosses before, nothing new there.  The bosses did the right first thing.  They got them some basic training specific to the work to be assigned, then broke the people into small (20 to 30 person) teams and then further broke these teams into smaller teams which could be matched up to the tasks the project was to complete.  Thus management did the traditional skills of aligning task and skills common on any project. 

This project was actually a program to completely automate a Canadian Frigate ship.  Not just the fire control system, the weapons stores, the communications and radar/sonar systems but anything on that ship that was electrical or mechanical in its operation.  This automation was accomplished through a distributed collection of computers, displays and interconnects.  In Montreal alone there were over 500 engineers assigned to this project.  Meanwhile, in St Paul, Minnesota we had another 200 or more very experienced engineers who had been working this project from the very beginning.  So, why did we have the Montreal component?  Our contract required a certain amount of what was called “Canadian content”.  We agreed to spend money so that it would directly go back into Canada.

There were some serious problems with this whole arrangement.  The capable engineers in Minnesota knew how to do the job and had done this type of work, very successfully, for a large number of years.  The contract was fixed price with a late schedule clause.  We could spend as much money and take as much time as we wanted but any money and/or time over the agreed to budget would be out of our corporation’s pocket.  And last but not least, the new people in Montreal felt that the people in Minnesota believed that Montreal people would not be successful. 

After some time, a cost and schedule to complete was estimated and, sure enough, the experienced engineers in Minnesota were right.  We were estimating a large cost overrun and a schedule slide of more than one year and the key component of it was centered on the work in Canada.  The estimated overrun was going to be very costly and caused a big stir at headquarters in Minnesota and throughout the corporation. 

So, management did what management always does.  They reorganized and assigned some new key players (a recovery team).  Any time an action like this is taken it is guaranteed to cause the original project team to feel like there is something wrong with them and that can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

I spent a large part of my career in the corporate world being a part of “recovery teams”.  I was very successful at it and it had nothing to do about my being better or smarter than the people I was sent in to “recover”.  In every case they knew far more about the project than I would ever learn.  In most cases it was not technical problems they were facing, but “soft” human problems, which are complex and “hard” to unwind. 

There are three secrets to success for recovery teams: 

(1) People do not resist change, but they do resist being changed.
(2) In this type of costly project problem, the top management is now ready to listen for what needs to be done and, for a short time the recovery team can get a blank check.  Just don’t go back to that well again!
(3) The people who know best how to solve any project problem are the people who have been working on the project all along.  They most likely had asked for what they need before and had management turn them down.  Don’t hire an outside expert to tell you what your project people already know, listen to the project people and act on what they say!

•  Each team would have all the skills necessary to accomplish their assigned task
• The teams could not be redirected by management to put out fires.  Only the teams could make this decision
• Leadership of the teams would be determined by each team and could change, as needed, by the teams
• Current management would take the role of giving them the organizational assets the teams felt they needed to accomplish their work, with no requirement to prove to management that they had to have these assets
• The teams would decide when to interact and asset share with each other
• The teams were required to present to management, on a regular basis, their team status, future plans and workaround plans