Cheetah Teams

You’ve got a crucial new product on a fast track. You know that if there’s any delay in launching it, you could end up ceding an important market to the competition. You’ve put your best engineers and marketers on the project team, and you’ve given them the resources and authority they need to succeed. Suddenly, a small but complicated technical problem crops up. The team members become distracted, other work gets delayed, and the entire project is in jeopardy. Maybe it’s time to call in a cheetah team. A cheetah team is a small, elite unit, separate from the product development team, that can be mobilized quickly to solve an unexpected problem threatening to hold up a project. By delegating the matter to the cheetah team, the product development group removes it from its mainstream activities, simultaneously buffering the project from disruption and freeing the cheetah team’s members from other distractions. To understand how cheetah teams work and what makes them effective, we studied the way they operate in the telecommunications and pharmaceutical industries. Consider the case of a 220-person product development team at a major Swedish telecommunications company. The team had almost completed a project involving the development of hardware equipment for mobile systems, and final product testing was under way at an outside facility. Only a few tests remained, and these were expected to go smoothly. Manufacturing was slated to begin as soon as testing was done, and the first deliveries to customers were scheduled to be shipped three months later. Because the failure of any test would jeopardize customer delivery dates, the project team had run detailed pretests, using the external test site’s specifications, to make sure there would be no problems. Despite all the precautions, one test failed, prompting a crisis meeting. Key people—task managers, technical experts, and the engineer from the test site—were gathered in the project manager’s office to determine the nature of the problem. When it was clear that no immediate corrections could be made, the group notified the division’s senior management, which formed a cheetah team to identify the source of the problem and solve it as quickly as possible. In order to recruit technical experts for the team from around the division, the top managers announced that the effort should be given the highest possible priority. A project manager known for her technical competence, objectivity, and coordination abilities was appointed to head up the 15-member team. In the first week, it identified the source of the problem—a technical glitch in a component that had been developed by another unit of the company—and identified the resources required to design a solution. At that point, the cheetah team dropped down to the five people with the engineering expertise needed to implement the solution. Meanwhile, the project team continued on, running the few remaining parallel test activities, completing product documentation, and preparing to ramp up production. The cheetah team redesigned the faulty component, and new tests were run successfully. Eight weeks after its formation, the cheetah team was dismissed, and its members returned to their usual duties. Manufacturing began with a minimum of delay and, although the full launch was pushed back a couple weeks, customer delivery commitments were met. What makes a cheetah team successful? Our research revealed five factors: the team is always ad hoc, it is initiated to solve a specific mission, it is dissolved as soon as that mission is completed, its members are committed full-time, and it is sponsored by top management. Organizationally, cheetah teams are not without their challenges. They perform rapid product development tasks well, but because they often sidestep organizational procedures to achieve fast results, they can create problems if used indiscriminately. Key technical specialists or other critical resources assigned to cheetah teams become unavailable to the rest of the organization, which can delay parallel projects. The benefits, however, can be dramatic. Fast and effective problem solving can save a project from disaster, avoiding costly delays, customer satisfaction problems, and dips in employee morale. And because the cheetah team members are focusing on the problem, the rest of the product team can continue with scheduled project work, increasing the team’s overall productivity. Fast and effective problem solving can save a project from disaster, avoiding costly delays, customer satisfaction problems, and dips in employee morale. Sparingly used, the cheetah team is a powerful strategy for solving critical problems. But like its namesake—the fastest of all land animals over short distances—the cheetah team is most effective as a short-term strategy.

Cheetah Teams

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