Rock Teams
Every organization has projects that they just don't seem to be able to make progress on because no one team or department is responsible. When they become critically urgent, a 'rock team' is a way to make significant progress inside a quarter.
How to deliver your toughest projects in under 13 weeks.
Context
A difficult project that requires multiple teams or groups to come together in a new way. Treating it like 'business as usual' hasn't worked. The time has come to make significant progress in a short period of time.
Discussion
There are two working modes most tech people are familiar with:
- the cross-functional delivery team, a group of 5-10 people working together daily, full-time, to build something in some collaborative style
- the project, where a project manager chases many people to complete tasks--often people whose day job is other work outside of the project
Each of these approaches have limitations. A delivery team works best with 7-10 people or fewer because communication is natural. If you're doing something big, you usually need some more formal structures.
But a project manager trying to manage work across many people and teams has to do a lot of extra coordination work, which can be exhausting and slow. They are often in competition with other project managers for the attention of the people who work on the project. Thus, projects tend to be late.
So if you need results in a relatively short period of time on complex work, what to do?
Play
Establish a temporary, virtual rock team who engage with high commitment and collaborate rapidly across the organization. This team uses agile methods for daily and weekly coordination - even though each team member also has a day job as a member of a different team.
At Rally, we used these plays to scale through the years leading up to our IPO. The approach was inspired by Verne Harnish's Mastering the Rockefeller Habits combined with our experience with collaborative planning at scale led by Jean Tabaka. Each quarter, execs would meet for a day with middle management, some line managers, and a few customers to select and plan the rocks each quarter. Then the memebers of the rock teams would feather their work into their operational responsibilities over the next 13 weeks.
I'm calling this a rock team because it's a natural fit for the play 3 Quarterly Rocks. But it works equally well if you're using OKRs and have a quarterly objective that requires people from multiple teams to come together.
A rock team requires five things: