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The team is dead... long live the virtual team
Two very different teams
While there are many variations on teams [i.e. sports teams, work teams], we make a clear distinction between two totally different forms of teams. These teams are different because they undertake very different types of work.
- Process teams
Process teams are teams of people who undertake routine and standardised activities or tasks. As we have discussed in other forums, process work is the most common form of work. It exists in all organisations and has the following structure:
- it is predictable;
- it repeats;
- it is standardised;
- it takes a short time to conclude;
- it maintains the status quo of organisational processes.
Examples of process work include most factory and assembly-line work, bank and insurance office work, hospital work, clerical work and so on.
Many organisations have used teamwork to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of process work. In fact, most of the pioneering groundwork in teams and team formation by innovators such as Fred Emery and Eric Trist in the 1950's, came from process teams in mining and manufacturing.
- Project teams
Project teams are fundamentally different from process teams. Project teams undertake project work and, by nature, this work is creative, dynamic and non-routine.
Project work is the exact opposite of process work. It has the following patterns :
- it is un-predictable;
- it is unique;
- it is difficult to standardize;
- it takes a long time to conclude;
- it changes the status quo of organisational processes.
Examples of project work include most IT work, film-making and other artistic events, strategic planning, business process re-engineering and research and development.
Project teams have always been different to process teams but, with the exception of pioneering work in the 1970's by Gerry Weinberg, Larry Constantine and our group, project teams have generally been ignored by mainstream organisation and management gurus. Most management experts either ignore project teams or focus on process teams or, alternatively, confuse both types of teams as the same team type.
In this paper, we are dealing primarily with project teams.