What Is a Multiple Team Project?

The multi-team projects that populate the project portfolio of large organizations are unlike any other development projects found today. If you organize business initiatives around client groups and business units, any project that crosses client lines gives rise to a multi-team project. The temptation is to let each team act on its own, with some integrating activity at the end to “glue” everything together, and hope that that approach will work. That is not the approach I recommend. My approach is more deliberate and planned, as you will see.

A more formal definition of a multi-team project is given in Figure 17-1.

Figure 17-1: Definition of a multi-team project

This is a simple definition, but it can serve your purposes quite well. In large companies this structure can occur quite frequently, but even in smaller companies it happens, too. For example, the IT department has its own methodology for doing software development. The mechanical engineering department has its own methodology for doing new product development. Teams from both departments are brought together to develop a new product with a significant software component. The IT team has decided that this is an Agile Project Management (APM) project and will use the Adaptive Project Framework (APF) adaptive project management life cycle (PMLC) model. The engineering department has used a Linear PMLC for over 20 years and has no intention of doing it any differently. You are the project manager. What would you do? I leave this unanswered here and have included it in the “Discussion Questions” section at the end of the chapter. Once you understand the three different organizational and management approaches you will be better prepared to answer this question.