Determine Integrated Team Structure for the Project

Product requirements, cost, schedule, risk, resource projections, business processes, the project’s defined process, and organizational guidelines are evaluated to establish the basis for defining integrated teams and their responsibilities, authorities, and interrelationships.

The simplest integrated team structure from an IPPD perspective evolves when the WBS is a work-product-oriented hierarchy, and resources are available to staff a team with the expertise needed to adequately address the entire life of the product for each work product in that hierarchy. More complex structuring occurs when the WBS is not product oriented, product risks are not uniform, and resources are constrained.

Structuring integrated teams is dependent on:

• Product risk and complexity
• Location and types of risks
• Integration risks, including product-component interfaces and interteam communication
• Resources, including availability of appropriately skilled people
• Limitations on team size for effective collaboration
• Need for team membership of stakeholders external to the project
• Business processes
• Organizational structure

If a project team has too many members for effective collaboration, the project team should be divided into subteams of appropriate size.

• Determine the risks in the products and product suite.
• Determine likely resource requirements and availability. Constraints on the available assets impact which teams are formed and how the teams are structured.
• Establish work-product-based responsibilities. Each team in the team structure should be responsible for specific tasks and work products. The team structure should tie to the WBS used by the project.
• Consider organizational process assets for opportunities, constraints, and other factors that might influence integrated team structure. Organizational process assets can provide guidance to assist the project in structuring and implementing integrated teams. Such assets may include:
  • Team formation and structures
  • Team authority guidelines
  • Implementation techniques for IPPD
  • Guidelines for managing risks in IPPD
  • Guidelines for establishing lines of communication and authority
  • Team leader selection criteria
  • Team responsibility guidelines
• Develop an understanding of the organization’s shared vision, the project’s shared vision, and the organization’s standard processes and organizational process assets applicable to teams and team structures.

  The shared visions for the organization and project are examined. These visions help the planners focus on attributes critical to the organization and the project. Organizational processes provide information to streamline the planning process. These may be particularly useful when establishing reporting mechanisms for integrated teams and when integrated team structures are constructed in hybrid situations such as project teams consisting of both functional and product teams.

  Alternative integrated team structures are frequently developed for collaborative evaluation prior to selection of the structure to be employed. Much like any other set of design alternatives, extreme cases should be included to test the adequacy of the solution set. Innovative concepts in integrated team structure that promote integration as well as efficiency can be overlooked if planning is limited to devising a single team structure.

• Evaluate alternatives and select an integrated team structure.

  The integrated team structure that meets the objectives, subject to the constraints of time, money, and people, is collaboratively evaluated and selected from the alternative integrated team structures. From the perspective of team-structure maintenance, this activity would include assessments of the teams already deployed and candidate alternative structures.