Do you want to be a storm hunter?

Do you have to?  Storm hunters, those individuals that go out of their way to get as close as possible to the nastiest storms, have something in common with project managers and the teams they lead; we all can get into more trouble than we bargained for.  Often times in project management the storm starts brewing in the project team.

If you work in an environment similar to mine, where team are formed and disbanded for a specific project, you routinely encounter the team forming, storming, norming, and performing sequence and it sure doesn't make life any easier.  This situation is somewhat unavoidable since my projects involve clients as well as colleagues but there might be a way to ease some of the pain.

Let me share with you a tale of the “good ol’ days”.  My very first paying job was as a soldier, specifically a Combat Engineer in the Canadian Armed Forces Reserve.  Since the army is very good at leadership and at building high performance teams, I’ll use this tale to highlight a major difference between the business and army ways of using teams.  You be the judge of which makes more sense to you.  Here goes…

Typically a section (the team) is formed by throwing a bunch of 18-20 years old testosterone-fuelled know-it-alls with biceps as big as trees together with a sergeant (the old crusty PM) and a corporal or master corporal (a junior PM).  The sergeant and corporal have to accomplish their missions (the projects), using their section, while all kinds of distractions (scope changes, unforeseen risks) are thrown at them by the enemy (a major stakeholder) or their masters (upper management, clients) all of this while making sure that the section cements itself (norming) regardless of all the challenges (storming).  I’m sure you are seeing the parallels with your projects.

The big difference between army and business is that the army does not disband the section after each mission; this would be wasting all the energies that were expended getting the section past the storming and norming phases.  Instead the army uses the section over and over again for various missions because a high performance team will always yield better results than a team that is going through the throws of storming and norming.  For bigger missions use more than one team.

Following the army method but in a project environment would mean tasking one or more stable, high performance teams with executing a project.  I believe that this would remove one of the main problems with projects, team infighting.

What do you think?  As always questions and comments are welcome.

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Comments

[Glen B Alleman]

The other big difference between the Army and business (and I've been in both) is the Army has pretty much a clearly defined mission.