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566 PRACTICING ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT, 2ND EDITION
Project Groups
Project groups represent groups of people who come together to achieve specific
objectives or tasks within a given timeframe. Typically responsible for a set of
specific business deliverables, these groups can include virtual teams, crossorganizational
programs, committees, and task forces.
The most prevalent type of project group is the virtual team. Gartner Group
(www.gartner.com) forecasts that, by 2005, 80 percent of all global knowledge
work will be delivered by virtual project teams (Gartner, 1999). Virtual teams
are groups of people who work together but are physically apart. Their activities
are often time-bound—they come together to accomplish a specific task
and, when their objective is met, they disband, with members joining other
newly forming project teams.
From a process perspective, the methodology for quickly and efficiently
assembling, launching, building, managing, and reallocating virtual team
resources is a growing capability critical for most organizations’ success in the
coming years. In addition, ensuring that new knowledge is captured and shared
across teams is essential for enabling organizations to continue to learn from
successes and failures.
Any assessment and selection of technology to support one’s work should
begin with an understanding of the context in which these technologies will be
used. Different groups require different supporting processes and technologies.
While by no means exhaustive, Table 24.1 summarizes the different types of
collaborative groups, outlines the core purpose that bonds each group together,
and describes the key supporting processes and technologies that should be considered
for supporting the group over time.
SOCIAL AND TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE
The concepts of social and technical architecture are derived from the principles
of sociotechnical systems (Cherns, 1976). Technical architecture represents the
technology—the specific tools, applications, websites, databases, and so on—
that are used for communication, collaboration, online learning, and knowledge
management. Social architecture includes the norms, roles, values, and group
processes that support the use of and interaction with the technology.
Just as with sociotechnical systems where the greatest organizational effectiveness
results when the technical system “fits” the social system, so it is true
with respect to social and technical architecture—the greater the alignment
between the technical and social architectures, the greater the likelihood that
the technology will be adopted and used successfully in service of the defined
group and organizational goals. Figure 24.3 illustrates the linkages among goals,