MANY ORGANIZATIONS ARE still structured and operated with a functional organizational approach, but are attempting to use cross-functional teams to perform processes within the organization that are core to the business of the organization. This presents quite a few challenges for the project manager, who must form and manage this team and the process to project completion. The Sacramento District Army Corps of Engineers (CofE) was very much in this model back in 1994 when it decided to take a different approach to managing hazardous, toxic, and radioactive waste (HTRW) remediation. The CofE was looking for a new tool that could manage the complicated environmental process and have enough flexibility to respond to unknown site conditions and varying regulatory requirements. Thus, the Total Environmental Restoration Contract (TERC) was born. This was a cost contract managed by the CofE for cradle-to-grave environmental restoration.
Two Levels of Teams. The environmental cleanup business (investigation through remediation) is an ongoing design and construction project, from start to finish. This process is best managed by a multidisciplined team that can work closely with the customer and federal and state regulators to find cost-effective solutions to ever-changing site conditions and regulatory requirements. In 1994, I was assigned as the TERC project manager and given the opportunity to put together cross-functional teams to manage this new tool in an organization organized in a highly functionally manner. There were two levels of teams that needed to be created. The first might be considered a program team. That is, we needed a team to manage the contract in terms of project management processes and contract administration (cost and schedule management, cost reporting, team processes, technical processes, property, vouchers, modifications, negotiations, and funding control). This team, with myself as the lead, would set the processes by which the second layer of teams, the site teams, would actually execute and manage the projects. This second layer of teams would generally be located at the environmental cleanup sites. The goal was to create cross-function teams made up of a project manager, government technical team members, a contractor, construction quality assurance representatives, and the customer. This team would be fully empowered to make all the necessary decisions to successfully manage the projects, from beginning to end, without having to go back through their functional organizations for issue resolution and direction.
Steve Lightner, PMP, has spent most of his career in design and construction in the Army Corps of Engineers. He is a senior project manager for the Sacramento District Army Corps of Engineers. For the past six years, he has led the team that has managed a $500 million total environmental restoration cost contract.
The first challenge was to set up the program team. This required bringing contract, budget, property, information management (IM), and project manager resources into one team and co-locating team members away from their functional organizations. In a traditional functional organization, having people one supervises move to a remote location is perceived as a loss of control. For the TERC project, this remote co-location probably never would have occurred had there not been strong support at the senior levels of the organization. This is rule No. 1: If you are going to be successful using cross-functional teams in a functionally organized organization, you need strong support from senior management. In my case, both the district engineer and the contracting element in the higher echelon (corporate) strongly supported this team model. The TERC model was new, and there was strong interest at the headquarters level to see it succeed. Locally, the district engineer was under strong pressure to clean up and turn over to private control an environmental site just north of San Francisco, Calif., USA; the TERC tool was perfect for the purpose. This provided the impetus for both co-locating and getting the team members I wanted, as opposed to those the functional organizations had available. This front-office support was critical for making the program team work. The success of this team was a direct result of locating away from team members’ functional organizations, and being composed of team members selected by the project manager for their abilities and willingness to work within the team structure.
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The next step was to develop the processes and procedures to form and operate the site teams. This was somewhat more problematic. The first concern was that the team members already were selected, based upon who was already working on those sites. Some were suited to this style of management, and some were not.
The second concern was that traditionally these players worked independently. That is, design was done in engineering, and construction personnel managed the construction contract independent of engineering. Each of these organizations was rather territorial about its roles and responsibilities. HTRW work requires close coordination of these resources throughout the whole process, and these barriers needed to be torn down. Third, a fully empowered site team doesn't require middle management. The traditional engineering and construction mid-level managers were being cut out of the picture.
Finally, in a cost contract, it is extremely important that the contractor performing the field work become an integral part of the government team. The cost risk for performance in a cost contract is on the government; team members would have to work together closely to make timely cost-efficient decisions to reduce this risk. The existing culture in the field was in managing fixed-price contracts and the confrontational/directive management approach that usually results from this type of contract vehicle. How to team these various elements was going to be a challenge.
New Management System. We were going to have to develop a whole new management system to address all of these elements. Our first consideration was that the traditional systems for correspondence control, document submittal and review, contract management, and payment did not lend themselves to this tool. Second, the technical oversight in the field had to be hands-on and focused. Additionally, personnel were unfamiliar with controlling cost and schedule in a cost contract. IM systems, while adequate to the functional organizations, were not well designed for the requirements of this type of information management.
Two factors came into play that greatly facilitated resolving some of these difficulties. First, there was strong senior-level support and encouragement. Second, this was a new management vehicle, and there was a great deal of enthusiasm and momentum generated for this nontraditional way of doing business. Senior management in the Engineering Environmental Branch helped write the processes to define the new procedures. This technical support for the cross-functional teams was critical to the later success of the site teams.
A third factor critical to success in highly functionally organized organizations is that you need to have allies at the middle-management level in the other functional disciplines that are also tied to your success or failure. In this case, it was the assistant chief of the Environmental Branch who was instrumental not only in helping to develop team processes but also in providing leadership and direction to his technical personnel to embrace this way of doing business.
An interesting sidelight, which explains a lot about functional organizations, occurred when we requested IM support to write new systems to help with the management of this complex tool. A great deal of resistance to this change was exhibited by the various elements in the functional organizations that owned the IM process for their functional elements. There was so much resistance that we finally gave up trying to work through the existing system. We hired our own IM specialist, someone who could focus on our systems and IM needs and then recommend and write software to support them. The only reason we were able to do this is because of strong senior-level support from the district engineer and benign neglect by the functional division chiefs. Since this was a program outside their typical span of control, they pretty much ignored our early organizing efforts, which allowed us more freedom than we normally would have enjoyed. Systems designed to support functional organizations are hard to change because they reflect the structure and soul for the command and control system. Although our IM operation is still looked on as a “rogue operation,” the lesson, again, is that if you are going to do something new and different, you had better have strong support from senior leadership.
Some New Challenges. At the program level, the team coalesced nicely. We had strong support from each of the team members’ real supervisors, and the team became focused (took ownership) on the success of our unit. In no time, it was difficult to tell that the team members really belonged to other organizations. The site teams, on the other hand, were another issue. We wanted to get them started right by having them recognize that we were providing the resources and processes necessary for them to independently control and operate their projects in the field. We wanted each team to work as a high-performing team, using all of its team members to help identify and solve problems as the project proceeded. The membership of these teams was predetermined and came from a culture that was not traditionally trained for these types of teaming arrangements. Our approach was to establish our own training and partnering sessions. We trained the teams in the processes that were developed, and we held “partnering” sessions to develop a common vision of success and help facilitate the teaming arrangements necessary to function. Our success has been mixed.
When you establish fully empowered teams to manage a process throughout its life cycle, you threaten some of the hierarchical elements of the functional organization. Middle managers in functional organizations, of which the Sacramento District Army Corps of Engineers is typical, act as senior project managers for their functional organizations. When you empower the team to assume this role, these middle managers are cut out of the process; the managers that are now out of the loop feel threatened and try to regain control of the project.
The site project manager is usually a technical manager matrixed in from these functional organizations. This individual's chain of command is now divided between the TERC project manager, who is instituting new processes and procedures, and the functional organization that writes the site manager's performance appraisal. This makes the imposition of new processes and procedures more difficult if the site project manager is resistant. He will get support from the traditional organization that is not tied to the success of your team and the needs of team management, and it will be hard to effect necessary changes in the team structure. In one particular instance, when it became evident that the project manager was not suited for this management style, the manager's functional organization failed to recognize the problem until a crisis was reached on the site team, which forced an even more drastic action.
The second factor that inhibits the establishment of empowered teams is the change in traditional roles and responsibilities. Execution in the field was typically managed by construction, which was “in charge.” In this new process, team decision-making, led by the project manager, was the new model. This caused considerable resistance from field elements, now asked to operate outside the cultural norm. Who was in charge was a continuing point of disagreement, even though it was clear in the new business process that the project manager was in charge. The new role for the construction element was construction services, not project manager. This was hard to accept and in some cases resulted in nonparticipation. The successful teams found workarounds where expertise was more important than organization, and project success was paramount.
WE HAVE LEARNED THAT the project manager business process using cross-functional teams challenges the traditional systems of command and control in functional organizations. As a minimum, in order to be successful, five elements must be in place:
■ A clear understanding of the business process being implemented
■ Strong and active support from the top level of an organization
■ Allies within each of the technical divisions, strongly tied to the project/business process success
■ Teams with a vision of the new process, motivated to embrace the new processes and enabled, with training, to succeed in the new processes and systems
■ Ongoing training and support to sustain the momentum.
Where we have succeeded, it has been because of strong leadership at the site project manager level and teams that have embraced the new project manager business process. Where we have failed, we have lacked that leadership and ownership, due to not having one or more of the above elements, and we have been unable to effect the necessary changes in the team's makeup to correct this deficiency.
Project management and the management of cross-functional teams can be successful in strong functional organizations, but the five elements identified above must all be present. If not, then success will be the result of a few exceptional leaders and teams and not the norm that we would hope to establish for the success of our organizations. ■